My first Shop

Forum|Forum|19 years ago
August 15, 2006
7 replies
653 views

Hi, I've been designing and building sites for years, but never done a shop. Lots of other stuff, but never a shop.

Are there any good tutorials out there. (I'm on the recordstore one at the moment http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/record_store.html)

I think my basic problem is I simply dont know where to start.

This topic has been closed for replies.

A

Anonymous

Nightfall_Blue, are you familiar with session variables? A 2-D session array could be your shopping cart - always there as your customer moves from page to page. As for the payment part, get the technical documentation from Authorize.net or Verisign. They are quite complete and tell you how to go about interfacing with them as the gateway to a merchant bank.

Bottom line from me is, If you want to learn how to do this, there's a non-trivial curve, so don't get involved in any tightly scheduled projects. On the other hand, if you are interested in industrual strength results quickly, do what Mary Jo suggests.

M

MaryJo

Inspiring

You work with Fusebox and MVC and want something that "plugs into" Dreamweaver? That seems a bit strange, the DW environment doesn't exactly work well with FB/MVC. But if that's definitely what you want, Cartweaver is probably the one to look at. It's got a fairly limited feature-set but if you just want a simple cart to start with, it should fit the bill.

As for the Exchange, you are right, it's pretty slow. Hotscripts.com is another decent site for looking for CF applications, where you can also find ratings and reviews on them as well.

A

Anonymous

yes it is a bit odd that I use fusebox and MVC, but not how to build a shop. In fact I've only just learnt logins and forms. I'm really not that good. But I for some reason found the fusebox an MVC architecture so much easier to understand that I use it all the time. It makes it so easy to find errors.

I've been looking at cartweaver today but I'm still not sure what that does either.

I have until September to produce this shop and I can easily produce the category listing and product detail pages ina few days leaving me a while to learn the fundamentals get something working online for the client and over time change it..

I want the whole shop to fit into my Fusebox and MVC structure because I have some fundamental SEO stuff to make life easier on the search engines to find products and I believe it would be wrong to build the site without putting that in.

A

Anonymous

I've spend the day scouring that irritating slow CF Exchange and there are very few options.

I bascially want to be able to develop shops for clients. Not big affairs, just start off small and work out whats going on so I can gradually improve upon it.

Not great with data structures myself and always seem to do better with arrays and variables and storing variables as client.var1 and session. var2

I guess I need something that plugs into dreamweaver.

M

MaryJo

Inspiring

Well, of course CFWebstore is the best! ;-) Seriously, you can find a number of CF carts listed here on the Exchange or at other CF tag and script listing sites. You'd have to evaluate the functionality and capabilities of each to determine which is best for you. As for how you use them...that's kind of up to you. With my particular product, you can use it to run the entire site, content and all (as on cfwebstore.com itself) or you can just drop the software into a store directory and just let it handle that portion. CFWebstore *is* one of the few (if not only) that's coded in Fusebox, although still only in FB3. I'll certainly move it over to FB4/5 at some point but that's not in the works just yet (a recent poll of my users showed it wasn't a high priority for most). I don't know of any ecommerce products done in MVC...if that's an absolute requirement, then you may indeed need to roll your own. The problem with doing something like MVC for a packaged product like mine is that it really is a bit complicated for most people new to CF and programming to wrap their heads around. I've found Fusebox alone confuses the heck out of most of them. ;-) Since it's very common to need to customize ecommerce sites, I try to not make the code *too* obscure for the newbies.

A

Anonymous

Thanks MAry.

I can produce all the databases and template pages. Thats not a problem. What I'll have problems with are the cart itself and how it remembers each users products, and the most frightening part of all is the payment process, through the secure server bit. I've never done that. Should I plan to use cookies, do these thigns use cookies, should I use cookies, how do you use cookies etc etc etc.

Of the carts I have found I have no idea what database they are using or if they are compatible with my version of coldfusion. Bascially I'm not sure if they will fit into my development process.

I hope you will see where my confusion is coming from

M

MaryJo

Inspiring

Well, there are a wide variety of approachs to how to do shopping carts. You can drop the items in the cart into an array of structures and store that in the user's session or you can keep everything in temporary tables and assign a temporary ID for the cart in the customer session or cookie. Those are probably the most common approachs but there are certainly many others. Yes, you do have to deal with securing the checkout, and while that's not really tough, you do also have to deal with things like making sure all your design elements are done properly as to not throw up security warnings, and that links will drop the user back to the unsecured side of your site. If you're using user accounts, you probably will want to secure your logins as well. And of course, you'll have to do the coding for whatever payment gateway you might want to use. A good ecommerce package has all this worked out already for you.

As for what DB or CF version they are using, generally that information should be found on the homepage for the product, and/or on the CF Exchange. You can expect most products to work on CFMX versions, some like mine will still work on CF5 as well. For databases, I would expect any decent ecommerce product to work on MSSQL and MySQL, most come with an Access DB but also include scripts or can be converted to these other databases.

If you have specific questions about any ecommerce package, by all means email the author! Pre-sales questions are a good way to at least somewhat gauge what kind of support you can expect if you purchase the product.

A

Anonymous

What are good coldfusion shop plug ins. And how do you use them? What I want is a shop which is integrated with the rest of my sites. And I develop using fusebox with an MVC architecture.

M

MaryJo

Inspiring

And of course, you may want to consider a pre-packaged ecommerce product (insert cfwebstore plug here). It really depends how much functionality you need. If you just need a very simple shopping cart, doing your own may be a fun project. But if you need a lot of bells-and-whistles, you'll save yourself a ton of time and headache just going with a good shopping cart software. And you'll learn a lot about doing ecommerce just from working with it and studying the code. One big benefit of buying the software is you get something that hundreds of users have already beta-tested for you. ;-)

A

Anonymous

my suggestion would be one of the forta books, coldfusion web application construction kit

these are a great books for taking from start to intermediate web application development.

-Nate

Nate Nielsen
nnielsen@cfgod.com
available for coldfusion consulting

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded