Hello, I've been lurking for awhile and wanted to post my success story on getting a Zencart site up and running on a Windows server hosted at Read yhos ting.com (RH).

I've been using RH for almost ten years, and I think they offer a good product for the price, and I needed to set up an E-commerce site for a client. Before I chose Zencart, I saw in these forums some issues people were having with getting it up and running on a RH server.

Some of the great features of RH (even though it's a shared hosting): you can select the version of PhP your site runs (unfortunately, still at 5.1) and you can admin MySQL databases easily.

The first step was to setup my database thru RH's control panel after the site was set up by RH. The setup page displays the real path to the database host that is needed to input during the setup process, so you'll want to leave that browser window open or make a note of that path. You'll also need the Windows path information from the RH Control Panel - click on the Windows CGI link.

I unzipped the Zencart install on my local drive, then FTP'd the files up to the server (took awhile--lots of files). I renamed "includes/dist-configure.php" and "admin/includes/dist-configure.php" to "configure.php" and set their permissions to 777, then ran the installer.

After the install ran, I got the success page, but a blank page on the shopping site, and an error message on the admin page. I then FTP'd the configure.php files down to my local drive and opened them for editing.

Because RH runs on a Windows 2003 server, I had to replace any forward slashes (/) in full paths with a double backslash (\\), but only in the full paths. For example, I changed
"define('DIR_FS_CATALOG', '\\\\nawinfs03\\home\\users\\web\\b9999\\rh.buyyouthcheer\\');".

Of course, anywhere there is a double forward slash, it had to be replaced by four backslashes. (For the uninitiated, backslash is an 'escape' character to let php know to interpret the next character as a characterand not part of a command or regular expression. So the first backslash tells php to interpret the next backslash as a "backslash", not a command). You don't really need to understand why, just know that Windows needs a backslash for path information.

For other sub-path information, for some reason I didn't need to switch to backslashes. For example:
define('DIR_WS_IMAGES', 'images/');
Gets interpreted correctly by php.

After editing the configure.php files, I FTP'd them to the server and set their permissions to 444.

I'm still working thru the docs and these forums figuring out all the details, but everything seems to work! I wanted to post this for other users that are considering installing Zencart on a Windows server, and in particular, hosted by RH.

Sherm Stevens
iNvision Studios