Specifications

We can work out the total of an order from a user’s shopping cart session variable. We will

record the final order details in the database, and get rid of the session variable at that time.

Administration Interface

In addition to all this, we will build an administrator interface that will let us add, delete, and

edit books and categories from the database.

One common edit that we might make is to alter the price of an item (for example, for a spe-

cial offer or sale). This means that when we store a customer’s order, we should also store the

price she paid for an item. It would make for an accounting nightmare if the only records we

had were what items each customer ordered, and what the current price of each is. This also

means that if the customer has to return or exchange the item, we will give her the right

amount of credit.

We are not going to build a fulfillment and order tracking interface for this example. You can

add one onto this base system to suit your needs.

Solution Overview

Let’s put all the pieces together.

There are two basic views of the system: the user view and the administrator view. After con-

sidering the functionality required, we came up with two system flow designs, one for each

view. These are shown in Figure 25.1 and Figure 25.2, respectively.

Building Practical PHP and MySQL Projects

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