VbzCart/docs/history

VbzCart was written specifically to run vbz.net, so I need to get into the history of the latter just a little.

vbz.net was at first (1996) a set of static HTML pages with a single-page order form listing all items for sale; order order notification emails were sent directly from that page via a simple form-mailing CGI script. Then I wrote a simple shopping cart in Perl, using text files cached to .dbm for catalog data.

In 1999, having finally learned how to work with databases in MS Access 97, I wrote some code to import orders more securely (via https) so unencrypted credit-card numbers would no longer be exposed during transit, and then some code to help manage them -- so we would no longer have to consult pieces of paper to see what parts of an order remained to be filled. Then in ~2000, I wrote more code (and tables) to help manage the increasing number of items in the store, as we added more suppliers (each with hundreds of different items in multiple varieties). [ Note: I might have the order reversed -- the catalog management might have come before the order management. I will eventually find evidence in my records and pin this down. ]

More features were added in 2001 and 2002; I'll detail those at some point.

The MS Access/VBA version of VbzCart was essentially "complete" by the end of 2001 -- though the codebase grew more or less continually from 1996 onward as new areas of functionality were designed and added, so there is no clear point at which it was "finished". The MS Access platform (at least as of MS Access 97) does not really lend itself to distribution of applications, however, so in another sense that version was "unfinishable".

The database was migrated to MySQL over a couple of years, starting with the stock data circa 2007 and finishing sometime in 2010 with some auxiliary tables. The management functions, which were at first still using MS Access as a front end for the MySQL data, were recoded as a PHP-based web interface from approximately 2009-2010 (still in progress as of November, 2010).

Further Events

• 2011-08-03 working (admin interface via MediaWiki), with lots of developer-level rough edges to work out. We're a long way from having an install script, and I need to post the code on a more appropriate venue such as GitHub.
• Somewhere in here, something seemed broken and I ended up doing a lot of rewriting... hopefully I can find the details in email messages or something. What I remember is that I had things mostly working again by the fall of 2013, but then...
• 2014-12-18 What seemed, in the fall of 2013, like a relatively small feature -- the need to let users access their pre-existing address records -- resulted in rewriting the entire admin interface to work without MediaWiki, which in turn resulted in creating an application framework to manage everything. The app framework is now working adequately, and now I'm just tidying up the checkout process and doing other cleanup prior to moving the whole thing from Rizzo to a commercial web server.