Hello!
I'm getting married later this year, and instead of doing a wedding registry we want to do a "travel registry." For those that haven't seen one of these before, it's basically an opportunity for guests to buy "parts" of the honeymood instead of a gift. Guests can buy a piece outright (like "snorkling for 6 hours"), or they can buy parts ("$200 towards the flight"). I plan to build this registry as an online site on a server I administer, and I want to build it in PHP (and probably MySQL as the database).
In a past life, I was a very experience PHP programmer, but I've become rusty recently and haven't coded PHP in about 2 years. So, I'd like to find some code that's close to what I want (and hopefully secure) to build upon.
The basic requirements are a very simple shopping cart with a few items with limited quantities (i.e. the flight might be broken into 20 $50 pieces). Users should be able to add pieces to their cart, and then go through a check-out process. After purchasing some items, they'll be removed from the registry (or greyed out). I'll be using PayPal for the credit card transactions, as it really isn't worth getting a merchant account for this small (one-time--hopefully!) project.
Does anybody here have some advice as to what code I could use to build upon, or any other advice on the project? There are lots of shopping carts and paypal gateways, some free, some for pay, and I'm a bit overwhelmed with all the choices. I don't mind paying for code, but I'd prefer to release the code to my entire site when I'm done, so an open-source alternative would be preferable.
Can anybody here help get me started?