Shopping Cart

BleedingSky

Hey guys, I'm very new to PHP and I was wondering if somebody could point me in the right direction towards creating a PHP shopping cart. Any tutorials or scripts would be great. I've been searching the internet now for two days and can't find a thing. Thank you very much.

bretticus

I did one google search and this came up on the very top of the page:

http://www.echocart.info/

It's an open source php/mysql shopping cart. The ironic thing here is that I noticed many of their backpages have cold fusion extensions. 😃

bretticus

Nevermind, I messed with their demo for five seconds and it sucks already. Tried to give you a quick answer and I struck out 😉

Basically, you just need a secure site, get familiar with using sessions (to maintain state for the cart items), or use your database to store the cart items (allthough this can be very taxing on your system). Since php will append the session id if it cannot write a cookie automatically (have to turn on session.use_trans_sid . Only use sessions in this way for storing shopping cart information as it can be a security issue), sessions are ideal in PHP for shopping cart info. You can also store arrays as session variables, which I think is pretty convenient for carts.

There's another quick answer for ya!

BleedingSky

K, thanks man. Right now I think that's a little too advanced for my knowledge of PHP so it looks like it's back to learning everything for me, hehe. Once again, thanks for your help.

bretticus

Just read up on arrays, sessions, and the php.ini file in particular (if you don't have access to php.ini, I believe you can use ini_set()

driverdave

Session objects are wonderfull. I use them in my carts, and they are very flexable.

If you haven't done any OO stuff with PHP, I'd suggest that a cart is a great place to start.