VbzCart/docs

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computing: software: web: shopping carts: VbzCart

Introduction

Having evaluated osCommerce (and, later, ZenCart) and found that, although it had many features I would like to have on vbz.net, it also lacked some crucial features currently needed (many of which are provided by the existing shopping cart system, and some of which would be needed in order to effectively manage porting the data from the existing system).

So I'm writing a new system, in PHP (originally started in Perl, but needed PHP for interfacing with MediaWiki) and MySQL, based on the data design of the existing VBZ cart system and adding new pieces as needed.

I will be taking notes on this page and gradually refining them into something resembling documentation, with the ultimate goal of producing a system which could be released under an open source license.

Status

VbzCart is very much in a pre-alpha state of development. I'm slowly porting chunks of it from its former platform, which was a combination of MS Access 97 and clumsily-written Perl. The stock data is now entirely in MySQL, and most of the catalog data is available in MySQL but still maintained in MS Access.

Documents

• VbzCart uses HyperAdmin for administration of privileged users (may end up using this, or may end up using MediaWiki to mediate log-in privileges)
• VbzCart tables: all tables used by VbzCart
• Data Concepts:
  • Carts
  • Orders
  • Sessions
• General Concepts:
  • VbzCart ordering: how ordering works (carts, orders, etc.)
• Other notes:
  • VbzCart tables in MS Access: the data schema as currently implemented (2006)
  • VbzCart catalog building: how the catalog is built from stock and supplier catalogs
  • VbzCart wikified topics: using MediaWiki to manage store topics
  • VbzCart shelved ideas: concepts and code which might be useful later, but isn't worth it right now