add to shortlist

etoast

hello
i am trying to add funtionality that i know involves cookies. basically on a list of options i want to give users the ability to add items to a shortlist. i don't want them to have to login/register and i know that this means that the cookie (and therfore shortlist) will only allow them to see the shortlist on that computer. i'm happy with that. so their shortlist stays as long as they don't delete their cookies.

i'm basically wondering whether anyone knows of any tutorials, or if anyone has any advice in terms of things to bear in mind or watch out for. searching "favourites" or "bookmark" only finds things to do with browser bookmarks.

know of any good places to start reading about what i want to do?
many thanks!

Roger_Ramjet

Try searching for cookies if that is waht you are after.

etoast

thanks, that is a realy wide topic too. my searches don't seem to find what i am looking for. the closest i can get is creating a login and then adding favourites to a database. i don't want that. i want the cookie to act as the database so that they are storing favourites on their own machine rather than tying up my mySQL space.

so... user goes into site. searches and gets a list of items. user likes item x. user clicks button to add item x to favourites. item x goes into cookie on user's computer. if user clicks on "my favourites" the cookie throws item x on to the page.

it sounds wonderfully simple in my head can someone confirm this is possible please, without a login/pass for the user and without a database in which to store any favourites?

thanks

mtmosier

The real meat of this question seems to be just setting cookies and retreiving them. After that there isn't much left to do, so I'm not sure what you're looking for in specific. If you want a tutorial which will give you line for line how to do your specific issue, then I suggest you pick a more common issue. 🙂

One interesting thing I'll note is that it is possible (I do it) to store php arrays in cookies, similar to how you would do with get or post variables. I save the cookies with names "myvar[0]", "myvar[1]", and retrieve it via "$_COOKIES['myvar'][$i]" (where i is a loop control variable). I don't know of a tutorial about that though.