Getting Started with nopCommerce: You don't have to be a techie to use the power of nopCommerce to sell your products online. This guide walks you through the many features of the engine to create a complete working store in easy steps.

nopCommerce has several requirements needed before you begin working with it. These requirements and prerequisites are different if you plan on performing custom development versus installing and using nopCommerce out of the box. The following list applies to versions of nopCommerce 2.0 through 2.8.

The following base components are required:

If you plan to write custom code or modify the existing code, you will also need to install the following:

Whether you intend to use nopCommerce out of the box or you want to make changes to the code, eventually you will need to host your website so that the public can visit your site and buy your products! Hosting providers literally host your website and provide a way for users to get to your site. nopCommerce can be hosted with almost any provider that uses Windows-based servers.

Choosing a hosting provider is an important decision. There are a lot of factors that should be considered before selecting a provider. First and foremost, you'll need to ensure your provider offers Windows hosting and one of the supported operating systems and databases, and has ASP.NET 4.5 with MVC 4. In addition, the following factors should be considered:

You can visit the nopCommerce website to view their list of Premium Partners. These are recommended hosting providers, all of which guarantee that nopCommerce can be installed and run on their servers.

A development environment is an area away from your public store where you can test out changes to your site. This is always a good idea if you are making user interface changes, code changes, or critical configuration changes. You can make these in your development environment without fear of affecting your public store or impacting users on your site. Once you are satisfied with the changes, you can then apply them to your public store.

A development environment is not needed to work with nopCommerce. You can instead opt to upload the files to your hosting provider and start using your site immediately. However, this is not recommended. There are a lot of settings and changes you will want to test before applying them to your public/production site.

You can download nopCommerce from the official site at http://www.nopcommerce.com. There are several options available when downloading nopCommerce. In order to determine which option to download, you need to decide how you will use it. The following options are available:

As you can see, nopCommerce can be deployed by a wide range of users with various skill sets. With each of these options, excluding the upgrade script, you can deploy nopCommerce to your development environment and your hosting provider.

Choose the option that you would like to download and click on the appropriate download link to begin your download. It is recommended that you create a new folder on your desktop to store your downloaded files for easy access.

nopCommerce will be downloaded in a compressed archive that will need to be extracted. At the time of writing, the archive is using RAR compression. If you have 7-Zip or other file archive software, you can simply right-click on the file and choose to extract the files.

It is recommended that you choose the option that will create a new folder for you. In the case of 7-Zip, this is titled Extract to ''nopCommerce_2.80_NoSource''. Choosing this option creates a new folder alongside the downloaded archive.

No matter which version you download, you should now have a folder that contains all the files you'll be working on.

How to install nopCommerce will depend on which version you've downloaded. In each version, the steps are very similar, but we'll look at each one separately. We'll only be looking at two of the available options, namely Web (no source) and source code. The upgrade script option is outside the scope of this book, as it implies you already have a previous version of nopCommerce installed. Using the Web Platform Installer is a "point and click" guided installation that is self explanatory.

In most cases, you are going to use one of the two options we'll be looking at next.

For this book, I'll be using the local IIS server in my development environment for all the examples. This means you can simply copy and paste all the files needed to the local IIS folder located at C:\inetpub\wwwroot. If you are using a development environment, you can do the same. If you chose to deploy directly to your hosting provider, you can upload your files via FTP. Once you have your hosting provider set up, you can create an FTP login and password to access your provider with.

Before uploading, you will need to create your database. Work with your hosting provider to create your database and user account. You will need to supply this information when installing nopCommerce.

Web (no source)

Deploying the Web (no source) version of nopCommerce is fairly straightforward. Your hosting account should have a root folder where all your web application files will be uploaded. Using your FTP program, connect to your hosting provider and upload all the files from the nopCommerce_2.80_NoSource folder. If you are using a development environment, simply copy all of the files and paste them to your IIS folder located at C:\inetpub\wwwroot (choose Copy and Replace if existing files are present; this will ensure the new files are copied in but existing file permissions stay intact).

Once all the files are uploaded, open a web browser and navigate to the following URL: http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com/install (where YOURDOMAINNAME is the domain name you selected and attached to your hosting account). If you are using a development environment, navigate to http://localhost/install.

Source code

The Source code version of nopCommerce comes with a complete Visual Studio solution as well as scripts to build and package the website for deployment. Once you have extracted all the source files, you can run the included Deploy.bat file.

Double-click on the Deploy.bat file to start the process. This file will build the website and create a new folder called Deployable, which is located in the same location. Inside this new folder will be a folder titled nop_2.80, which will contain all the files to upload.

Note

Visual Studio is required to run the Deploy.bat file. Visual Studio is also needed to build and compile the source code into a deployable format.

Your hosting account should have a root folder where all your web application files will be uploaded. Using your FTP program, connect to your hosting provider and upload all the files from the Deployable/nop_2.80 folder. If you are using a development environment, simply copy all of the files and paste them to your IIS folder located at C:\inetpub\wwwroot (choose Copy and Replace if existing files are present; this will ensure the new files are copied in but existing file permissions stay intact).

Once all the files are uploaded, open a web browser and navigate to the following URL:

http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com/install

Here, YOURDOMAINNAME is the domain name you chose and attached to your hosting account. If you are using a development environment, navigate to http://localhost/install.

Note

Real world

When uploading your site to your hosting provider, there are some folders you may not want to upload. For instance, the Content folder holds all the product images that nopCommerce displays to users. These images are generated by the system and may be held in the Content folder. If you upload your local copy, you may overwrite images you don't mean to.

Installation

Navigating to the installation page of your nopCommerce site will launch the installation process. This is a guided installation, and you will need to provide some information for the install to successfully complete.

You'll need to enter the following details:

• Admin user e-mail: This is the e-mail address for the first admin of the site.

• Admin password: You will need to supply a password for the admin account.

• Create sample data: Check this box if you would like sample products to be created. This is recommended so you can start working with your site before adding any of your own products. You can always delete these items later, or unpublish them so they no longer appear on your site.

• Database Information: Here you can select either SQL Server Compact or SQL Server. It is recommended to use a full SQL Server product, not the Compact edition.

• Create database if doesn't exist: It is recommended that you create your database and database user beforehand to ensure a successful installation. Simply create a database instance and add the database user to it. The installation process will create all the tables, stored procedures, and so on.

• SQL Server name: This is the IP, URL, or server name for your database. You will get your SQL Server name from your hosting provider.

• Database name: This is the name of the database used by nopCommerce. If you opted to create your database ahead of time, use the name you gave your database here.

• Use SQL Server account/Use integrated Windows authentication: If you are installing at a hosting provider, you can use your SQL Server account and supply the credentials you created with your database. If you are using a development environment, you can select Windows authentication. If you are using Windows authentication, the account hosting the application pool in IIS must be a user in the database.

• Specify Custom SQL Server collation: This is an advanced setting and should be left unchecked.

After all the required information has been provided, click on Install. You will be presented with the installation progress screen.

Once the installation is complete, you will be presented with the homepage of your new storefront.

nopCommerce requires write permissions for various files and folders. Write permissions allow nopCommerce to modify these files as you make changes to the environment. During the installation process, permissions will be validated for these items. If you do not have appropriate permissions set up, a warning message will be displayed with items that need to be configured.

The following folders and files need write permissions:

If you find that you need permissions modified, please check with your hosting provider to help you modify these folders and files. Some providers allow you to modify permissions from your hosting control panel, while others will require technical support in order to modify these for you.

If you are deploying to a development environment, this should not be an issue, as you should already have appropriate permissions.

In this chapter, you were introduced to the various download options for nopCommerce as well as its prerequisites and requirements. You also learned about how to set up your development environment if you wanted to perform any custom development. You then learned how to install nopCommerce and how to set the necessary permissions. In the next chapter, you'll explore the storefront and dig into the customer experience.