Anyone know of any free/cheap 'online shop' software?
A forum search brought up this oscommerce open source software (http://www.oscommerce.com/) which looks like the dogs whatsits, but it's 'out of the box' and requires a lot of tweaking about, and I'm not sure I have the time or patience to learn how to do it....

At present it would be just an experiment, i.e chuck it onto my web space at nildram. If things looked promising I'd go for hosting it elsewhere, but anyway that's all in the future and there's loads of good info to be had on it with a forum search.

So back to the original question...
anyone know of any free/cheap 'online shop' software? Or is it better to stick with oscomerce and try to get to grips with that?
Thanks,
Draggle

You're not going to get any ecom stuff that doesn't require any setup. I've seen oscommerce used in lots of shops so I'd give that ago. I'm guessing your hosting will need PHP and MySQL support.

You're not going to get any ecom stuff that doesn't require any setup. I've seen oscommerce used in lots of shops so I'd give that ago. I'm guessing your hosting will need PHP and MySQL support.
Fair enough ..... I'll give it a go and try to approach it as a project/learning curve sort of thing.
Thanks for your comments :)

draggle, since I pm'd you, I have the fix to update installations done via fantastico.

can email it if you want

OSCommerce is great once you get your head round it, but a bit of a sod until then. There's another version I've been meaning to check out, someone's done a "pre-modded" version of OSCommerce, the Chain Reaction Edition (http://sourceforge.net/projects/cre-osc-loaded), which is apparently good.

I've done various bits to a few OSCommerce installations, PM me if you have any problems if you like...

draggle, since I pm'd you, I have the fix to update installations done via fantastico.

can email it if you want
Thanks mate - I haven't got that far yet. I chucked all the files up onto my web space at nildram (but still need to check that it supports PHP and MySQL) if it does, I think the next step is to download MySQL for editing purposes....)

Meanwhile I will have a look at the Chain Reaction Edition posted by steev (thanks steev)

Thanks to both of you for offers of help. I'm bound to be in touch once I start playing with this :)

With it being Nildram (compliments on the choice of ISP BTW) I'd assume that php would be good... Best bet for mysql database would be to ask them. If they do it they'll provide...

hostname
db name
db user
db pass

which the OSCommerce installer asks for.

With it being Nildram (compliments on the choice of ISP BTW) I'd assume that php would be good... Best bet for mysql database would be to ask them. If they do it they'll provide...

hostname
db name
db user
db pass

which the OSCommerce installer asks for.

Thanks steev, helpful that. I'll chase it up, allthough having looked at nildrams site they say they provide "100MB of non-commercial web space" :(

first question

OK I set up (via fantastico) with the patch to overwrite the global_variables security.

Am i right in thinking that part of the set up (the options) is done by the web interface (currency, default language etc etc) and the text is done by editing the relevant string in the .php file

So the work flow would be ftp to download > alter in dreamweaver or whatever > ftp to upload > test in browser > repeat ?

thanks in advance

...ftp to download > alter in dreamweaver or whatever > ftp to upload > test in browser > repeat...

Spot on for edits like re-skinning, & anything not covered in the control panel.

My nildram webspace doesnt support php and MYsql (I would have to buy commercial webspace from them) - not worth it for what was a bit of an experiment in the first place.

Meanwhile my googling has taken me down a different route with a new idea, so I'm bowing out of this thread (for now, at least) :)

Thanks to you both for your support - hope you continue to help each other out. Why not consider starting a Sheffield forum group (http://www.sheffieldforum.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=68) on the subject?
Draggle