Specifications

Building Practical PHP and MySQL Projects

ART V

540

In this chapter, you will learn how to build a basic shopping cart. We will add this on top of the

Book-O-Rama database that we implemented in Part II, “Using MySQL.” We will also explore

another option—setting up and using an existing Open Source PHP shopping cart.

In case you have not heard it before, the term shopping cart (sometimes also called a shopping

basket) is used to describe a specific online shopping mechanism. As you browse an online cat-

alog, you can add items to your shopping cart. When you’ve finished browsing, you check out

of the online store—that is, purchase the items in your cart.

In order to implement the shopping cart, we will implement the following functionality:

• A database of the products we want to sell online

• An online catalog of products, listed by category

• A shopping cart to track the items a user wants to buy

• A checkout script that processes payment and shipping details

• An administration interface

The Problem

You will probably remember the Book-O-Rama database we developed in Part II. In this

project, we will get Book-O-Rama’s online store up and going. The requirements for this sys-

tem are

• We will need to find a way of connecting the database to a user’s browser. Users should

be able to browse items by category.

• Users should also be able to select items from the catalog for later purchase. We will

need to be able to track which items they have selected.

• When they have finished shopping, we will need to be able to total up their order, take

their delivery details, and process their payment.

• We should also build an administrator interface to Book-O-Rama’s site so that the

administrator can add and edit books and categories on the site.

Solution Components

Let’s look at the solutions to meeting each of the requirements listed previously.

Building an Online Catalog

We already have a database for the Book-O-Rama catalog. However, it will probably need

some alterations and additions for this application. One of these will be to add categories of

books, as stated in the requirements.

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