• Lesson Index:
• Overview
• Yahoo Stores
• Signing Up
• Granting FTP access
• Granting Store Access
• Security Key
• Yahoo ID Password
• Using PayPal
• Changing PayPal
• YStore UPS Tools
• Process Orders
• Yahoo Store Notes
• ZenCart for Merchants
• Open Close Store
• Update Products
• Customer Welcome
• Order Confirmation
• Fulfilling Orders
• Statistics Reports
• Database Backup
• Backup Plugin
• Clean Admin Log
• Tasklist Summary
• ZenCart for Developers
• Sideboxes and EZ Pages
• Editing EZ Pages
• Template Overrides
• Suggestive Sell
• Graphical CSS Buttons
• Configure Shipping
• Sales Tax
• Installing PayPal IPN
• Email Notifications
• Patching ZenCart
• ZenCart Notes

ZenCart is a more modern spin-off of osCommerce, which is a hughly popular open-source shopping cart.  The problem with osCommerce is that it requires a certain register_globals flag to be On in the php.ini.  This in itself is not bad, but in combination with certain types of "loose code" in the software it may (and I emphasis the word "may") present a slightly higher security risk.  Nevertheless, I do not like to set this flag in the php.ini.  Hence, I like to use ZenCart instead. But if you like to use osCommerce, here is more info about it...

Installing osCommerce

You can download the latest stable release of osCommerce from oscommerce.com. You should download the documentation for that release found on the same download page. This documentation is more for the administrative and configuration of osCommerce. It only provides a brief summary of the installation. For detailed installation instruction, you should downloaded or viewed online as linked. Follow the instructions in the documentation for installing as they are more detailed. We will only provide an general overview here.

Two other helpful resources are the knowledge base and the community support.

1. In regards to the pre-installation proceedure, I prefer the FTP Base Method. After downloading the osCommerce software zip file, unzip it, and upload the catalog directory to your webhost document root (typically public_html folder).

2. Change permission of catalog/includes/configure.php to 777.

3. Create or find out the username and password and databasename of MySQL database on your webhost. You will be needing it in the next step.

4. Run web-base installation from http://yourdomain.com/catalog/install and then follow instructions with details here.

5. If you are on shared hosting, typically you would enter localhost for the database server. You do not want to checkmark Persistent Connections. You want to use Database for Session Storage for greater security.

6. If you encounter the error "FATAL ERROR: register_globals is disabled in php.ini", you can either

a) Change the php.ini file to have register_globals turned on. You might need to copy that file to all sub-directories that has php files. However, having register globals turned on in conjunction with poorly written code is a security risk. I do not recommend having register globals turned on. In that case, you will have to do option b.

b) Download the Register Globals patch and leave register_globals turned off. The problem with using a patch is that every time you upgrade, you will need to re-patch (with an updated patch). Also other contributions that you might install does not work with register_globals turned off.

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