Magento is a feature-rich, professional open source e-commerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store.

Magento’s powerful marketing search engine optimization and catalog management tools give merchants the power to create ecommerce sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Magento is distributed free under the GNU General Public License OSL license.

Magento is a registered trademark of Irubin Consulting Inc. DBA Varien. It is currently listed as in a preview release mode and not recommended for use in production environments. There are articles written by community members who have tried this new program and available for your benefit at http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/

Is this software compatible with your server?
Megento can be used on any server that is Linux or UNIX based. It can be run on a Windows based platform but at the moment there are some known issues that are being worked on and it may cause some conflicts, although, there are some documents on the main site to help. You can find some guidelines here http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/magento-installation-guide/print

One of the known issues is the image uploads do not work in Windows.

This system is a Linux based software program and was designed with ease of install on a Linux based platform that has PHP 5 installed. This software is a PHP 5 only application and may cause issues if your system only supports PHP 4, although there is a work around solution found here http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/installing-magento-on-a-php4-server

If you do not have any programming knowledge or skills, this system may not be suitable for you unless you have a technical support team who can assist you.

The server requirements for this software are:
- Linux or another UNIX-compatible operating system
- Apache web server (1x or 2x)
- PHP 5.2
- MySQL 4.1
- A sendmail- compatible Mail Transfer Agent (MTA)- if not Megento connects to SMTP server.

Also recommended is the use of APC as a bytecode cache for performance improvements. You can find it in the PECL archives here: http://pecl.php.net/package/APC

Other bytecode cache systems are not supported at this time.

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OsCommerce www.oscommerce.com is an open source online e-commerce software solution that is available for free under the GNU General Public License. osCommerce was started in March 2000 in Germany by project founder and leader Herald Ponce de Leon. Every year the members of the community join forces in designing more add-on features to increase the feasibility and functionality in all areas of development. The new version 3.0 is planned to hit the market and it will have a template feature that will allow users to create a more unique layout for their site.

OsCommerce was designed with a rich set of out of the box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort, and no costs, fees, or limitations involved. This software was designed for ease of install and usability for any online store owner from newbie to techno king.

Is this software compatible with your server?

OsCommerce can be used on any web server that has PHP and MySQL installed. Most of the web host providers have included this software for a general automatic install from your account control panel or within the Fantastico control panel, depending on which host provider you have gone with. If you do not have the automatic install capability, the osCommerce software is available from main site for downloading and installing manually.

You will need to know where to access your files, usually under the file manager option in your control panel, to FTP your extracted files into the correct folder. You can use this software as a standalone site, meaning you can choose to install in the root directory of your domain, and have the store as you main index; or you can choose to install in a sub directory as an add on, an example being http://www.yoursite.com/store.

Although the oscommerce is not the “ultimate” e-commerce solution, it is by no means “basic”; with the capabilities of customizing to meet the specific needs of ones own business.

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