E-Commerce Site????

[Silence04]

ok, my company is going to start doing somee-commerce sites in the near future.
anyone have any tutorials, links, or suggestions?
we pretty much have no clue how to even start, or any of the problems that could occure....like security issuse.
it would be great if someone could share any basic knowledge they have about it and the things that we need to know....

what we doknow is HTML and a little bit of ASP andCSS.
there was talk of sourcing it out, but i think we want to first try taking it on ourselves.

Thanks guys! http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/emoticons/hop.gif


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[Big Perm-dizzle]

i would go with a company like storefront they provide everything you need....

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[Big Perm-dizzle]

however my friend who is a developer built a shopping cart that is not a 3rd party cart and he will sell it to you but he is expensive

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[Silence04]

i don't know what type of os/database will host it....would that be the same as the os used on a server that host our site?


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[Allen Harkleroad]

We use a product called BV Commerce (>net and SQL) , there is alonk to the site here
http://www.gmpservices.com/hosting.asp

we are working on a client site right now for it at
http://www.yubbi.com

it is awesome software and at a good price too.
Alsmost everything can be done from the admin area including the main page (content manangement builtin).

Allen




Allen Harkleroad
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[3howards]

why use a 3rd party source if you are supposed to be developing/providing one for your customer? tehy can just go to those sites and set it up themselves because if YOU do that, you're just the middle man, not a web developer. it's really simple, either you develop it or you don't. don't give your clients some idea that you can do something you can't, that's dishonest.

you need to learn how to do it yourself so that you set the requirements for client and server side solutions. i'd try and find some tutorials on how to do it myself. just do a google search, it's that easy.

[Big Perm-dizzle]

'it's that easy'

ummm okay....you must be a developer

its not dishonest if you tell them what you are doing....many people dont care how they get there money. They want you to take care of the details...

I resell godaddy hosting to my freelance clients at 25 bucks a month and I tell them go get the hosting for yourself and its like 4 bucks but they dont want to have to worry about it so they let me do it for them.

People pay for peace of mind

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[Benjamin]

Both approaches are OK I think.

I'm thinking of learning the basics myself. Some of the books on PHP cover shopping cart design and linking to MySQL. For example Larry Ullman's book 'PHP and MySQL for dyanmic websites' seems OK.

With a bit of knowledge of PHP I might also be able to take one of the free shopping carts like osCommerce or Zen shopping cart and adapt it to my needs.

But I think setting up a third party product is fine too. Afterall it's still a pain to configure and integrate into the website etc.,

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Om Namah Shivaya

[Frank D'Elia]

Did you ever think about learning ColdFusion? It is the easiest lagnguage to learn from scratch, and in my opinion most powerful. Also, there are loads of ColdFusion Shopping Carts available.

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[3howards]

cf isn't really necessary and it's very expensive for the client. to me it's a rip-off unless the site is developed entirely with macromedia products, i.e. flash, fireworks, freehand, and dreamweaver. cf has some cool aspects, but why spend thousands on developing with it when you can do it for free with asp or php. as you can tell, i haven't jumped on the cfmx bandwagon yet.

in regards to the ecommerce setup, if you have any future in web development you need to learn how to develop ecommerce and dynamic sites. an big perm, no, i'm not a developer, i'm a designer, but i work in a team environment and directly with a programmer who is showing tidbits about what he does. i just think it's dishonest to advertise ecommerce solutions when you rely on 3rd party software to do the job. although, if the client is fully aware of the setup, than it's not really an issue.

my company resells hosting too and our clients are fully aware about it. just like you said, it's peace of mind AND something they don't have to do which they have no clue about. but, hosting itself is a different issue.

[Frank D'Elia]

Howards,
I agree with you totally on the 3rd party comments, but did you know ColdFusion is FREE for a developer to use and download? You develop the whole site on your computer, set up all the DSN's in the admin, then upload it to the host, and thats it. And there are many cheap CF Hosts out there.

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[3howards]

free, really? something i didn't know before and has never been mentioned in my macromedia user group meetings. hmmmm. why should i have to look for new hosts for me or my clients when we already have hosting and resell plans to our clients?

i dunno, i just don't think cfmx is as great as its' claims. asp, asp.net and php are excellent for ecommerce and database development. i'm open minded though, so i'd be happy to hear any arguments in regards to the advantages of using cfmx over the other server-side languages.

[Frank D'Elia]

Howards,
Some core functionality may be available just by downloading ASP or PHP software, but ColdFusion includes significant integrated services that are not included with other products. Major features like dynamic business graphing and full-text search engine capabilities, as well as small utility features like handling file uploads and reading and writing e-mail messages are not part of ASP and PHP and are included with ColdFusion.

New ColdFusion Components (CFC's) interact with Flash perfectly. The future of the internet is going to be Rich Internet Applications. Apps that have the user experience in mind.

Something that we develop standard now is flash based forms that interact (Insert records, confirmation email, etc.) with CFC's they are great for the user expericence. Something that is very difficult with PHP or ASP, even .NET.

For example visit our contact form (nothing will be sent we are in the middle of coding the CFC) just hit the submit button and watch what happens, much better for the user to see that, then to jump to another page, etc.

Sorry to go overboard, but these are just some of the benefits over the other languages.

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[axoi]

Frank,

Obviously you don't know PHP that well. PHP was doing email when CF was just starting out. PHP has been around since 1995. PHP file uploads is dirt simple too.

The main problems with flash and to some extent cold fusion is they are not 508 compliant. You can not get a differently abled person the ability to see your flash application.

Also consider that the EU has recently passed a law that allows disabled people to sue a webmaster/host for discrimination if they can not visit their site.

I believe that your wrong about the Rich Internet Application paradigm. I believe that the web will become ubiquitous and you will not realize that your viewing a web server in the future - because it will be embedded in a whole bunch of applicances. How does flash address this?

- Bill

[Frank D'Elia]

With email I mean reading and writing POP 3 email not simply sending a message.

In how many lines of code does it take to upload an image and then output the file name in PHP? I have a site that used 'Pure PHP Upload' and it was well over 70 lines of code.

<!--- ColdFusion Ex. --->
<cffile action = 'upload'
fileField = 'FormField'
destination = 'c:\web\uploads\'
accept = 'jpg'
nameConflict = 'MakeUnique'>

File you just uploaded was named: <cfoutput>#serverFile#</cfoutput>

The bottom line is whatever you feel comfortable with use. In our case it is with out a doubt ColdFusion. Fewer lines of code, Custom Tags, CFC's, Verity Search Engine, Scheduling, Graphing, etc.

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[axoi]

Frank,

<?php
if( is_uploaded_file( $_FILES['file']['tmp_name'] ) ) {
if( move_uploaded_file( $_FILES['file']['tmp_name'] , $_FILES['file']['name'] ) ) {
echo $_FILES['file']['name'];
}
?>

That would be three lines of code eh?

POP3 and IMAP are both possible from PHP with about the same amount of code...including attachments.

- Bill

[3howards]

ria's are also done with php and from my experience is not difficult at all. i know many programmers that prefer to use php with flash apps. i kind of agree with axoi about the ria's though. i don't think the future of the web experience lies in flash apps and that is becoming more and more apparent with the spread of web standardization like css, xhtml, xml, etc. i know that the larger corporations like ford motor company are already implementing this technology because it doesn't require 'add-ons' to work on an international level.

i personally think that ria's are cool. the one in particular that i was shown in a macromedia seminar was the broadmoor hotel reservation app. still it requires you have the latest flash plug-in. believe it or not, there are quite a bit of viewers that don't have it installed. for this reason, i think that flash-dominated sites are impractical Internet related business functions.

[Frank D'Elia]

Bill,
It is pointless to go back and forth with code, but just from the look of it, what looks easier and faster to learn.

In the case of our friend Silence04, he does not have any knowledge of a language, in your opinion, which would he be more comfortable getting started with?

I was trying to suggest the best way to get started, and in my opinion it is CF.

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[Benjamin]

I really like the whole concept of open source stuff that everyone can help develop, especially when it works as well as PHP seems to. Also it seems to be far more widely used than CF at the moment. For me that would tip the balance in advising someone new. However, I don't actually know any CF so I would like to learn at some point and see what the difference is.

Actually for a newcomer with no programming experience I think there's a lot to be said for using a 'proper' programming language (strongly typed etc.) first. Getting the hang of programming is really independent of which language you use. I Learned Pascal at Uni and at first we were really up in arms with the teachers, saying that we wanted to learn Java. Who uses Pascal? But at the end of the course I could really appreciate their decision because it allowed me to understand everything step by step from the ground up and there's a bit too much going on in Java to start off with.

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Om Namah Shivaya

[Ryan8720]

I started with Java, because the standardized tests switched to it. I wanted to learn C++.

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[axoi]

I started with basic on a commodore 64 back in 1982. I switched to machine language, then to C. Now I know too many languages to count and sometimes the syntaxes all run together. Ugh.

I would suggest ASP with VB would probably be the easiest as you know a little already. ASP.NET would be good to learn as well.

I would suggest PHP only if you have some experience programming. PHP is a lot like C and Perl mixed together. PHP can do more than just web apps...the same as ASP.

It really depends on what you intend to do once you get started. PHP runs a lot of ecommerce sites.

- Bill

[3howards]

well, i'm not a programmer, but i'm married to one. and we have had the discussion about php, asp, asp.net and coldfusion. whether you learn asp or php or coldfusion, once you learn one, you'll be able to learn the other. they all pretty much stick to the same rules and techniques. but i would highly recommend asp or php as a springboard. just like benjamin said, it's more accessible and practical at the moment.