17 December 2008
Posted in D.I.Y. Ecommerce - Using Zen Cart to make money online

Now you need to login to your 1and1 control panel to make some changes to the files you just uploaded, before starting the installation. Open a web browser and go to the 1&1 home page. In the top right of the page click on customer login. Type your domain name as the user name, then below type your password and hit enter.

What you are now going to do is rename a few files in order to configure the files to your future needs and also you are going to change some file and folder 'permissions'.  This means that we are going to make a number of the files accessible and changeable, for the install process, coming soon. As you will see we will change some of them back, after we complete the process.

Click on the icon labelled Webspace Explorer in the box titled 'Webspace & Access'.

In the left hand pane click on the folder called includes. Now in the right hand pane right click the file called dist-configure. From the drop down list select rename. Rename the file to, configure.php. Be sure to spell it exactly as I have and without any capitalisation. Press OK when done.

Finally for this file right click it and select, Change Permissions, then in the box next to the right of the label, 'Octal number', delete the current contents and enter the number 777. Click OK when done.

Now move back to the left hand pane and click on the folder called admin. Then again from the left hand pain click the includes folder. Note this is not the same 'includes folder as the previous step this is the one within the admin folder.

Again find the file dist-configure. Right click it and from the drop down list select rename. As before rename the file as, configure.php. And, as before, make sure to spell it exactly as I have and without any capitalisation. Finally for this file right click it and select, Change Permissions, then in the box next to the right of the label 'Octal number' delete the current contents and enter the number 777. Click OK when done.

Next we need to make a number of folders and sub folders write-able. This is so the installation program, we will start shortly, can modify them. Use the method above to change the following folders Octal numbers to 777.

cache
images
media
pub

Now for the sub directories. The process has an extra stage compared to the directories above because we have to find them first. I will guide you exactly through the process for the first sub directory then you should be able to repeat the process for all the others. First up is /includes/languages/english/html_includes

So in the left hand Webspace Explorer pane click on includes. Below it will pop up some more folders. They will be slightly indented to the right. Click on languages. Some more options appear slightly more indented. Next click English (getting the idea?) and finally right click, html_includes in the right pane and change the Octal number setting to 777.

Easy! Now repeat the steps above for the following folders.

admin/backups
admin/images/graphs

And finally all of the sub folders (and sub folders of sub folders, but there are only a few of these) of images need there Octal number set to 777.

This is a bit of a bore but chin up your almost ready to install your shop for real!

images/attributes
images/dvd
images/large
images/large/dvd
images/medium
images/upload
....
And all the rest under images.

When your finished it is time to run the Zen Cart auto-installer.