osCommerce replacing index.html

Hey Everyone,
I'm extremely new to osCommerce so this question may seem semi - retarded. I setup OsCommerce fine through powweb but wanted it to come up as soon as people entered my site. So i figured I'd just replace the index.html file with the index.php file from osCommerce. Now i get the error

"Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required 'includes/application_top.php' (include_path='.:/usr/local/php4/lib/php') in /www/i/iconsys1/htdocs/index.php on line 13"


I'm not sure if it is telling me to add '.:/usr/local/php4/lib/php' on line 13? or if I just totally did this the wrong way and there is a special way to go about this. Please help!

thanks in advance

[stevel]

Let me take a guess as to what you did. You installed osCommerce and took the default so that it put all the osC files in a subfolder named catalog or perhaps even something like oscommerce/catalog. You want the store to be your site, so you took the catalog/index.php file and moved it up a level to under htdocs.

This won't work - osC assumes that the relative folder structure stays the same. The proper way to do this is to install everything to the proper level initially, so that index.php and all of its files and folders underneath are in your htdocs. I don't know if the PowWeb install can do this - what I did was download the ZIP of osCommerce to my PC, unpack it where I wanted it, and uploaded all the files to my site.

Some may suggest a redirect, either in an index.html or .htaccess, as an alternative. While this is easy, it is also ugly and you will be penalized by search engines for it.

If you move the files, you don't have to redo the database and install scripts. Just edit the two configure.php files to reflect the new path. While you're at it, rename the admin folder something else hard to guess. And don't forget to password-protect admin using .htaccess.