Shopping Cart/Checkout Design

Not for 'how-to' coding questions but PHP theory instead, this forum is here for those of us who wish to learn about design aspects of programming with PHP.

Moderator: General Moderators

Post Reply
jayray
Forum Newbie
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue May 09, 2006 1:07 am

Shopping Cart/Checkout Design

Post by jayray »

I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of a good book or information on the web or any information for a shopping cart and checkout pages down in PHP with a MYSQL DB. I am mainly concerned about the design, but it would be nice to see some code. I want to build something solid and logical. Something that is easy to maintain and also easy to troubleshoot. I don't want to just throw up some procedural code that is ugly and only works part of the time. I want to do it right from the begginning and design it right before I start any code. Questions I am having deal with things like how much information to store in the session object verses storing in a temp database. How to correctly handle errors in PHP. What kind of database schema to use. I am not running PHP 5, but how realistic is it to use object oriented classes? Thanks for any help you can provide.
User avatar
Christopher
Site Administrator
Posts: 13596
Joined: Wed Aug 25, 2004 7:54 pm
Location: New York, NY, US

Post by Christopher »

I have tried to break the ecommerce stuff down into a number of objects in my own code. I find there are a couple of different places relating to ecommerce where I have needed code.

- Product and Cart pages need links that perform various operations. The Cart need to understand these requests and modify the Cart accordingly

- The Cart is a datasource containing product quanties and qualities.

- Calculation of additional charges -- specifically shipping and taxes.

- Order processing where the content of the cart needs to be submitted for payment processing and if successful and Order created.

- User account data as it relates to limits or features of the cart, special order procesing, additional charges, etc.

- Administrative management and reporting of Orders


There are probably more. Is there a specific area that is your interest? Or the whole process?
(#10850)
Post Reply