Why oscommerce? Powering more than 14 000 online shops around the world, oscommerce has become one of the most widely used and trusted ecommerce solutions on the web. OsCommerce is an open source project that was started in March 2000 and created using PHP and MySQL. Being open source software it has a very active development community. This means that software patches and updates are more frequently available than that of commercial software. The basic installation of the software is simple yet elegant, providing all the functionality required by most types of online stores. If you however require specialised functionality, oscommerce is also highly customisable with either community-supplied add-ons or custom code. Security Issues As a hosting company Hetzner is committed to act against criminal activity such as phishing and unsolicited email (Spam) quickly and diligently. We have identified that compromised content management systems (CMS) such as oscommerce as one of the leading causes of these problems. To guarantee your site's uptime and the reputation of your business it is critical for you as an oscommerce user to secure your site. As oscommerce is continually being developed and improved it is critical to understand that securing you site is not a once off affair. Despite the basics of ensuring secure file permissions and ownerships it is also necessary to stay up to date with the latest security updates and patches. Please refer to the following link on the official oscommerce documentation site for the latest information and assistance with security issues: http://www.oscommerce.com/
SSL In order to have a reputable and secure online shop it is important to encrypt your web content using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption. In order to implement SSL on your account please send an email requesting this to our admin department (admin@hetzner.co.za). Once SSL has been installed on your account you will notice a public_ssl directory when using FTP to upload files. This directory is where all secure content have to be uploaded to. Additionally in order to validate your SSL encrypted site you can apply for a certificate. Please contact our admin department for additional information (admin@hetzner.co.za). How are transactions processed on my website? It is important to note that oscommerce is purely an online catalogue for your products. It helps you keep track of your stock and present your products to your clients in a visual and ordered fashion. In order to have a live shop however you will require the following: 1. A merchant account from a bank of your choice in order to process your clients credit cards 2. A payment gateway. This is the software that facilitates the transfer of information between your oscommerce installation and your merchant bank account. Merchant accounts can be obtained through most South African banks. We suggest you explore your options; discussing with your bank which payment gateways they support with their merchant accounts, what the transaction fees are and check with the gateway if it is compatible with oscommerce. The following is a list of some of the more popular payment gateways:! Pricetag (pricetag.co.za)! MWEB (mweb.co.za)! iveri (iveri.co.za)! Setcom (setcom.co.za)! Paygate (paygate.co.za)! MyGate (mygate.co.za)! Netcash (netcash.co.za)! Virtual Card Services (vcs.co.za)! Payment24 (payment24.co.za)
Installing oscommerce Because of the popularity of oscommerce we have automated the installation process for our Basic and higher account holders through our konsoleh management system. For additional information on how to install and access oscommerce using konsoleh please refer to the following link: http://supportcentre.hetzner.co.za/index.php?action=q_and_a&id=491 If you however prefer to manually install oscommerce, all of Hetzner's Basic and higher hosting accounts are capable of running the software.! Step one As oscommerce is open source software the installation files can be freely downloaded from their home page: http://www.oscommerce.com/! Step two The next step is to upload the installation file to you hosting account and uncompress it. The upload can be done with any FTP client of your choice. If you require assistance with this please see the following article on our Support Centre: http://supportcentre.hetzner.co.za/index.php?action=q_and_a&id=149 You will notice that this file is in.zip format. This is a Linux / Windows compressed file format. To uncompress it you will need to open a SSH (Secure Shell) session to you hosting account. Please contact our support department and request that they enable SSH on your account (support@hetzner.co.za). In order to do this we highly recommend you download the PuTTY SSH client: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html Please follow the steps below to access your server via PuTTY Start the PuTTY SSH client In the host name text box type your FTP user name, followed by the @ sign and your domain name (ftpuser@domain.com) Now enter your FTP password.
You will now be logged into the home directory of you hosting account. As OScommerce is an ecommerce application you will probably want to extract into a sub directory so that it does not clash with your existing website. For the purposes of this guide we will place the OScommerce files into a directory called shop. In order to uncompress the OScommerce installation file that you have uploaded to your public_html / public_ssl directory: Please type the following commands:! cd public_html (change this to public_ssl if required)! unzip oscommerce-x.xrcxa.zip (Replace X with version numbers)! mv oscommerce-x.xrcxa/catalog./! chown FTP_USER:FTP_USER * -R (please replace FTP_USER with the FTP username of your account) The last command, chown, changes the file ownership settings on your files so that they are usable by the user assigned to your account. Once you have entered the above commands you can browse to the website (domain.co.za/catalog) and complete the online installation.
! Step three oscommerce uses a MySQL database to store and keep track of product information thus you will need to create such a database with konsoleh: http://supportcentre.hetzner.co.za/index.php?action=q_and_a&id=163! Step four You are now ready to start the online installation, which can be done by browsing to your newly installed oscommerce catalog directory (http://yourdomain.co.za/catalog). During this process you will be asked to enter the details of the database you created in step 3. The rest of the online installation process is self-explanatory and once this is completed you have successfully installed oscommerce