Informasion

For now, don’t worry if you are not entirely certain about how each piece of software fits together, or how they produce a working online shop. Chapter 3 will give you a brief, high-level look at the technology you are using to build a business, and will give you a solid grasp of how everything is tied together behind the scenes. At the moment, we need to concern ourselves with setting everything up and ensuring we have a good platform for the development phase. This will involve making a few adjustments to each bit of software; for example, we will need to create a username and login for the MySQL database, which osCommerce can then use to gain access.
Because all these technologies can be utilized from either a Windows or a Linux-based computer, this chapter will cover installation of osCommerce on both operating systems. Installation and setup for Apache, MySQL, and PHP will only be covered for Windows because we trust that Linux hacks will have everything installed already (or will know how it is done)—on the off chance that you don’t have everything installed, a quick glance over the instructions given on the site should suffice to get you on your feet.