Caroline asks “the other day I bought an ebook showing how to design a shop, but I don’t have any spare space in which to set up a test shop. Can you help?”
Caroline – yes I can help! Most “professional” coders don’t use a normal website/host to develop websites – instead they use their own laptop or computer. You might well be thinking “how the heck…” – I’m going to show you how. It’s really, REALLY simple.
Step 1: Install PHP, MySQL and PHPMyAdmin onto your home computer. This is simple as all you need to do is go to Fire Pages and download their program called “phpdev”. Unzip the package and follow the instructions! Within 10 minutes you’ll have it all installed, all being well.
Step 2: Download the latest version of osCommerce and unzip it.
Step 3: Start up “phpdev” and go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ – in here create a database ready for use.
Step 4: Open up the “www” folder within phpdev and copy al the oscommerce files into it.
Step 5: Run the usual osCommerce install procedure. When you get to the database screen simply use the name of the database you just created.
Step 6: osCommerce is now installed on your home computer!
Step 7: Right click on /includes/configure.php and set the attributes to “read only”. Delete the whole /install/ directory.
Step 8: You MIGHT need to delete a couple of the .htaccess files (the one in /includes/ probably).
Later on, I will make a video of the above so that you can see just how it is done, and how quick you can get an osCommerce site up and running…
Why phpdev? Why not wamp? (http://www.wampserver.com/en/).
FWIW, a comparison of Windows Apache + MySQL + PHP can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_WAMPs .
Wamp just as good 🙂
I prefer phpdev.
http://www.clubosc.com/oscommerce-on-localhost-tutorial.html