Quick install of OScommerce

Just recently I start looking around for setting up an e-commerce site, and I did look at a few open source e-commerce softwares available. OScommerce is one of them, so far everything works fine. In this article I’d like to write down the installation procedures that I used to set up OScommerce with Apache Virtual host

1. Download oscommerce and unzip it into a directory whereever you like
2. Create a MySQL database and a corresponding database account for oscommerce. If you have access to phpMyAdmin, then you can do a google/yahoo search on that. It should be pretty easy. remember that you don’t have to use phpMyAdmin, you can also use MySQL client or any other tools
3. I am assuming you want to have http://www.yourdomain.com, so let’s create an Apache virtual host, please make sure you enable and set up apache virtual hosts (do a search on this topic)

   For Windows (assume you install oscommerce under c:\oscommerce-2.2rc2a):
   <Directory "C:/oscommerce-2.2rc2a/catalog">
AllowOverride All
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
<VirtualHost IP-ADDRESS:80>
DocumentRoot C:/oscommerce-2.2rc2a/catalog
ServerName www.YOURDOMAIN.com
ErrorLog logs/www.YOURDOMAIN.com-error.log
CustomLog logs/www.YOURDOMAIN.com-access.log common
</VirtualHost>

   For Unix (assume you install oscommerce under /etc/oscommerce-2.2rc2a):
   <Directory "/etc/oscommerce-2.2rc2a">
AllowOverride All
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
<VirtualHost IP-ADDRESS:80>
DocumentRoot /etc/oscommerce-2.2rc2a
ServerName www.YOURDOMAIN.com
ErrorLog logs/www.YOURDOMAIN.com-error.log
CustomLog logs/www.YOURDOMAIN.com-access.log common
</VirtualHost>

4. Go to http://www.yourdomain.com, and fill in database information. Please follow the screen to proceed.
   Database Server - the machine's IP address/hostname where your MySQL DB is hosted, normally localhost. Either IP address or hostname will be fine
Username - should be username for mysql database
Password - should be password for mysql database
Database Name: the oscommerce database name

5. Make sure that the permissions on all of the folders are set to 755, and both includes/configure.php and admin/includes/configure.php are set to 777 for the duration of your installation. Once the installation is done, change their permissions to 644. On windows platform change <OSCOMMERCE-DIR>/catalog/includes/configure.php to readonly
6. Remove <OSCOMMERCE-DIR>/catalog/install directory after the installation is complete. Or back it up
7. Finally create your administrator account
8. Now visit your new site at http://www.yourdomain.com

I will try to comment on how easy the software can be customerized for different themes/templates

Update: Change the code font-size