Web Design Forum?

[stlewis]

Dale

When I realised that I needed to go the database route, I looked first at ASP - I could run it easily on my Windows machine for development purposes - with Access as the backend. Having a fair bit of VBA experience (although usually of the find-a-suitable-bit-of-code-and-tweak variety), I got it working easily enough.

Via this forum and elsewhere I then got views that Access really wasn't suitable for concurrent rights and SQL Server on the other hand was expensive. So I looked at PHP/MySQL. This too was easy enough for my level of experience. I have bought several books - Teach Yourself, Virtual Quickstart and a SAMS book. All have been useful and all contain free code that you can use.

I now have various PHP systems running - powering the menu at Bricks and Brass, another which is effectively a content management system for the Products and Services Directory, and others for events, books etc.

So I can recommend that route!

www.bricksandbrass.co.uk

[UnHoly]

My secret weapon as far as forums goSitePoint [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[dalel]

Thanks for the info on PHP/MySQL. I will probably go that route, since my client's sites are currently on UNIX servers.

Thanks to everyone who offered links and info!

http://www.eyesitewebdesign.com/dale.gif

Why, I’m afraid I can’t explain myself, sir, because I’m not myself, you know...
- Lewis Carroll

[toad]

Dale

After 2 years of part time trying to solve this ecommerce puzzle I am about to launch a store using miva merchant.Miva merchant is a database driven shopping cart written in miva script that dynamically generates product pages.It requires the installation of the miva empresa engine on the web server but there are many miva enabled hosts available.Some of the reasons I've chosen miva merchant are that it allows a virtually unlimited number of catagories and products,has a user interface that allows considerable customization and it's relatively inexpensive.There are a lot more reasons but the big one is support.Although miva corp. has begun to charge for support the best comes from user groups.http://www.miva.com/support/usr_grps/.This is a very busy mail list and sometimes gets a little out of control but it has been solid gold for me.Although the topic is the miva merchant cart the people on the list are merchants,designers,hosts,developers,search engine experts,security experts,etc.You can find out which hosts actually understand ecommerce and security(extremely important).You can talk to developers who write plugin modules to add functionality to your stores. With miva you can manage a mall within the admin and add stores by just purchasing additional store licenses.I also have miva's personal version of their engine called miva mia which lets me serve store pages locally.I can tweak and experiment without touching the live store.There is also a miva coders list if you want to dig deeper.You'll need to decide which host,merchant account,payment gateway,security cert,etc.I found all these answers on the merchant-users list.One developer is close to release of a product to allow merchant to work with mysql.One has just released an order manager.Bottom line:you can have a store online in less than a week that is virtually unlimited and you have complete control over,then continue to add functionality over time.I've seen many times when a designer has had problems with a customers store and this list has saved their bacon. I just don't have that kind of confidence in any corporate support. And BTW miva runs on win or unix,best on unix.
Ive investigated dozens of ecommerce solutions but never used any so I am not actually recommending this one but I am suggesting you look into it.

toad

[d-sine]

hi dale,

there are a fair number of places you could go to get answers to many of the questions you have but maybe some of the more "true-to-life" answers could come from members of this forum as we're all in the same kinda boat here and we also have different views and experiences on such things, thats partly why places like this exist, its like a gigantic evolving think-tank i guess [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

i have just finished (pretty-much) producing an ecommerce site for my employer (www.zingsmusic.net) and we are currently finishing off the "populate with products" stage but that is as much on going as anything else. I have produced the site with a software package called Actinic Catalog (www.actinic.co.uk). I shall not fob you off and say that we haven't customised the site heavily but thats the great thing about it, if you want to built a site to your own (or your customers) style then thats always possible. I have a good couple of years experience with this software and its one of the best i've been exposed to. It can be ran on Unix or Win boxes and all it needs is decent webserver and Perl really which is kinda common.. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

I am always on the lookout for new stuff to work with and I've recently discovered an open source ecommerce package called OScommerce (www.oscommerce.com) which is about 2yrs old and has had some decent sites produced with it. I am currently evaluating this for our next project, and its looking good so far. OScommerce uses a mixture of PHP & MySQL for the backend/engine and has quite a flexible framework allowing you to do a great deal depending on your requirements.

Please give this forum a go, you're bound to get a pleasant surprise and we don't bite! I've just come back after a six month stint working silly hours and this place is a good escape from work so i shall be around with a good many others to help when and where I can.

Hope that helps, and sorry for the small novel!!

d-sine.

:: d-sine :: www.d-sine.org

[diane buenger]

About 6 months ago I did a lot of research looking for off-the-shelf shopping cart solutions. In the end we did a custom one in PERL. During the research though I became impressed with MIVA merchant (MM)- which is well tested, stable and configurable.

In general, I would be careful in writing your own cart, since code errors might result in fraud for your visitors. At the very least, if you are doing credit card processing, I would get some professional feedback about security before I went live. Dan Meriwether at delux.com is really good at this sort of disaster proofing. Still, it may be better (and cheaper) go with a proven system like MM.

If you are going to learn a db system, I would put my money on PHP/MySQL as a horse that's likely to finish the race.

cheers
diane
http://www.thenwhen.com/thenblog/

[diane buenger]

oh one more thing about MIVA.

Socrates (my husband) is a MIVA programmer and he and Martin Hodge (a MIVA pioneer) have a company that does MIVA and PHP powered forums (forumexperts.com)

Of course, I don't know from MIVA myself, but if you have questions, I can probably get an answer for you.

[This message was edited by diane buenger on June 11, 2002 at 12:21.]

[gidgit]

Wow, this is a super bit of info you have provided Diane... [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Thank You

[dalel]

I thought that this thread had died several weeks ago, but it came back to life. Great!

I am learning PHP/MySQL, and will decide what to do about a shopping cart/CC/database system after the website jobs are secured and I get a better idea of what the clients want.

I will probably buy a proven system that I can learn to maintain, rather than code my own, though. My web host offers a very economical
e-commerce package if the client has an inventory that is fairly small, about 30 items or less.

Diane, MIVA seems pricey at $595 PER DOMAIN. Is that right? I'd like a system I can reuse after I buy it. It also says it must have a MIVA enabled domain. Does that mean your web host must have MIVA functionality?

Thanks again!

Dale

Why, I’m afraid I can’t explain myself, sir, because I’m not myself, you know...
- Lewis Carroll

[diane buenger]

Many, many web hosting companies have MIVA and offer MIVA Merchant (MM) through their web hosting plans. MM as offered by these companies is configurable through a web interface. An excellent hosting company that we used to use (before we got our own servers) is http://www.webaxxs.com - they offer a large MM account for about $30/per month.

The benefit of using something like MM over a host-proprietary program is that if you ever need to move the site, you can also move the cart. I learned this lesson the hard way when a hosting company I had used got bought out by the evil empire.

There used to be a free program called Miva Mia which ran MIVA locally on your machine for development purposes. Socrates tells me this is no longer being made available by the company. You might check to see if anyone is offering downloads still.

Good Luck
diane