Simple is relative…
I’d like to describe my last couple of days. This is long. If you prefer, you can jump to the question at the bottom of this post. It’s now Thursday morning.
Tuesday (about 8 hours):I’m a newbie when it comes to web sites. Anything about web sites other than reading them I know next to nothing about. I’ve been a desktop database developer for 25 years and trainer during that much of that time teaching people how to use computers and its software. I tell you this so you will understand that I am not new to computers and software.
A friend of mine asked me for help in getting her web site migrated from Yahoo to LP. Cool I thought. A chance to learn something I have not spent any time with. People say it’s “easy”.
I successfully downloaded her site from Yahoo. Now how do I upload it to LP? Fortunately I got help from these forums (thank you!!). But one of the instructions I got was to upload it to my public_html folder. Interesting because I didn’t have one. Did I delete it along the way somehow? Beats me. However, I’m happy because it’s at least where it needs to be (BTW, this took all day Tuesday to complete this task. I haven’t gotten to Wednesday yet.)
Wednesday (about 9 hours):She was doing a little ecommerce on her Yahoo website. My next endeavor is figure out how ecommerce works (by the way, I do NOT know HTML, but I do know how to drag an drop, so I’ve been using Coffee Cups HTML editor which allows me to do just that).
So I go the forums and do some searching. I’m looking for a step by step instruction SOMEWHERE. The best I can find is a direction to Fantastico on the control panel and look for eCommerce. I also find numerous positive and negative articles about OS Commerce. I decide to give that a try. I still haven’t found any posts with a step by step instruction. But I find numerous links to OS Commerce so I assume I will find step by step instructions there.
When I get to the OS Commerce site I download osCommerce Milestone 2 Update 060817. There’s no setup.exe so it’s back to the osCommerce site. I download their instructions. In the New Installation section it tells me to upload the catalog, catatlog/admin, and extras folders to my pubic_html folder. I do that. Next it says to use phpMyAdmin to create a database and assign a user.
Ok. What’s phpMyAdmin? A google search brings me to their site. Looks like another download. I do that. Again I can’t find a setup.exe. I find “documentation.html” and start reading the quick install section.
Have we attained simple yet? Have you read that section? Holy cow!!
“Ensure that all the scripts have the appropriate owner (if PHP is running in safe mode, having some scripts with an owner different from the owner of other scripts will be a problem). See FAQ 4.2 and FAQ 1.26 for suggestions”What’s PHP? And who owns the scripts? From here the instructions got even more technical.
I’m tired, I’ve been spider webbing from one link to another in an attempt to find some helpful information. I give up and go have some dinner.
After dinner I’m dinging around on the LP site just taking my time and hanging out. In the control panel I click on mySQL databases. I’ve been developing desktop database apps for 25 years, I figure I’ll have a look. It asks me to create a database, add a user and determine what privileges I should have. I answer the questions and on the bottom of the screen in a font size small enough to ignore I find a link for phpMyAdmin. Eureka! I found the spot! I manage to create a simple test table and even import data from a text file. WOW!!! Progress!!!
Question:But now what? I’m still looking for a step by step on how to setup ecommerce. I know there are many choices out there, but I would dearly love it if someone where to take all the choices out of it for now. I can always change things down the road if something isn’t complete enough. My friend has a very simple and small set of products to sell. Is there a step by step instruction out there anywhere I can use to help me get this up and running on LP?
Thank you!!
Mark
