HELP with carts

Anon

Hi, Im setting up an online shop for my boss, I've got the product listing pages, database, and just about everything else sorted out, so what I need to do now is figure out how to get a cart set-up to track what the users had added to the cart, and to store the nessary information into the database once they check out, however so far i've not been too hot on this 🙁

I've spent some time reading articles on cart systems, including some called min-cart which was on this site, but my brain can't figure it all out.

Can someone out there, using plain emglish possably explain the basics of a cart system, and maybe give me some sample code to play around with?

Thank you for your time.

crowezr

You should look into using either cookies or PHP sessions. Information can be found on both at the php.net site or by searching previous posts here.
Cookies: http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.cookies.php
Sessions: http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.session.php

Anon

Hi, I was going to use sessions backed up with cookies, but that is not really the problem.

The problem that I've got is that I really don't know how to structure the cart, what type of information will it need, how can I update or delete information once it has been added to the cart? stuff like this 🙂

thank you

Anon

For my shopping sys I'm making, I only use one session: session_register("cart");
then $cart[$artid] to store articles, and $cart[$artid]["amount"] for the, yes, amount.

The rest i get from the database, using that session. To add & update the cart:

if (!isset($cart[$artid])) { $cart[$artid]["amount"] = 1; }
else { $cart[$artid]["amount"]++; }

To delete ordered just unset() it. Hope I helped somewhat =)

// Thomasson

toma42

5 part series begins here:
http://zend.com/zend/spotlight/php-shopping-cart1.php

Anon

Thank you, I'll check it out.