This part of my website is dedicated to e-Commerce and the open source applications that help make it possible. In the pages of this site you will find videos to help you install the different applications on your local computer so you can test each application you are considering for use as the engine for your online store.

The videos demonstrate how to download, install, and configure a local version of the Apache HTTP server, the MySQL database server, phpMyAdmin database control package, the PHP Zend scripting processor, Mercury mail server, FileZilla FTP server, and a control panel for the entire package. The package is known as XAMPP. Installing this package on your local computer allows you to install and test a number of open source shopping cart applications based on the PHP scripting language. You will also find videos in these pages demonstrating the installation of a number of these applications. It is my intent to create videos demonstrating the installation of as many of these applications as I come across in the open source community. I further plan to create pages offering my evaluation of each of the applications as I test them.

The list of applications I have installed on my own computer and created videos and evaluations for are: Zen Cart, osCommerce, Magento, DigiStore, FishCart, OpenCart, and PrestaShop. If there are others that any of you would like to see added to these pages please let me know.

Zen Cart is the first application I installed and forms the basis for all the others. I chose Zen Cart simply because I have a client who's store is based on the Zen Cart application and I need to be able to support the client's site. Curiosity led me to discover the other applications that will be featured on this site.

These videos were created on an Intel Pentium 4 powered PC running Windows® XP. The videos require the Adobe Flash player version 8 or newer.