I am working on a site for a client. The site is almost entirely written in PHP so in theory it should be easy to convert it to a mysql based site (I have a lot to learn in this area however)
I am a bit stuck right now and need your thoughts....
The client sells custom baseball bats mainly for different companies. When he sets up a company, they do a bat with that companies colors and logo. At that point he has me do a login for that customer which leads them to their own special page with that bat at the top of the page. The company is always thrilled to have their "very" own page. I am actually just setting up the login and making a copy of another companies page with their bat at the top. The page is basically just an order form which right now when submitted sends an order email to my client.
He can also have generic customers come to the site and order. Finally there is one very large company with different divisions which has there own order page that is different from the others.
Ok, got all of that? What I need thoughts on is some ideas on what to do. I realize that basically the generic customer and the other small companies can be based off of one database. The client actually instead of the database doing an autonumber for each customer, wants say company A to have a special customer_id and company b the same. The generic customer however could have an autonumber.
I have looked at shopping cart software such as oscommerce but first of all I don't think it would work in my case, and second of all I would basically have to start from scratch.
Well, thats enough rambling. I would appreciate some different brainstorms on how you would approach this problem. I will in the meantime be dipping into the tutorials.
Thanks for your help.