Install an on-line shop - Part 1

This weeks tutorial will walk you through the steps necessary to install a version of the extremely powerful and popular Open Source shopping cart based on OsCommerce called CRELoaded.

But why not install OsCommerce itself ?  Unlike many Open Source projects OsCommerce releases new versions fairly infrequently and these have always concentrated on getting the core functionality right.  Whilst this makes for a very stable on-line shop solution is does tend to leave the default installation a bit light on features.

However, in the true spirit of Open Source, numerous other developers around the world have put together contributions that enhance the basic OsCommerce installation.  Unfortunately, incorporating these contributions can vary from pretty tricky to down-right impossible.

CRELoaded is a ‘supercharged’ version of OsCommerce where a group of developers have not only integrated more than fifty of the most useful contributions but have also fixed any bugs that they’ve found along the way.  This makes CRELoaded better suited to those users that either have limited time or technical knowledge.  That said, this is a reasonably complicated tutorial and it’s essential that you have Apache, PHP and MySQL installed before you start this.  If you haven’t now would be a good time to work through our tutorial on installing Sokkit (a bundle of Apache, PHP and MySQL) on Microsoft Windows.

Once you’ve finished the tutorial you’ll have a working on-line shop installed on your computer that contains a number of sample products.  Customers will be able to register accounts and even ‘purchase’ products.  However, whilst it’s entirely possible to use CRELoaded to run an on-line shop, running it on a local computer as we’re going to do here isn’t recommended even if you’re on a broadband connection.

To run a real shop using CRELoaded you’ll need a secure server running PHP and MySQL, a domain name as well as the installation of the appropriate payment module for your bank as well as PayPal and NoChex.  What we’ll cover in this tutorial will illustrate the potential that CRELoaded offers.  If you want to take it further we suggest that you talk to your friendly eCommerce Advisor.

Before we can get started we need to download the files that we need to install CRELoaded.  To continue with the tutorial click here.