OT: shopping cart on OSR 507 + filepro

[John Esak]

I wrote a combo shopping cart, invoicing, credit card taking system for my
site. It did all the SS fpacct, and the SS fpTraining stuff. However, the
whole back end was filePro and the web interface was mostly PHP written or
rather cobbled together by someone who didn't know anything about PHP.  I
was constantly having to go in and "fix" or "adjust" the PHP scripting to
work completely and thoroughly the way I usually want everything to work.  I
found PHP to be horrible as well, learning just enough of it do what I
needed to do or fix for the person who was trying to help me with no
knowledge of her own.  In the end run, I re-wrote the virtually the entire
thing with the help of a rather expensive program from sound Ideas called
WebPub.  It is not meant to do a shopping cart by any stretch, but after a
while scrapping all of the crappy code from the inept programmer who had
aimed me toward PHP, and re-including a nifty program from Fairlite called
RAW QUERY to submit the credit card info to my gateway... I got it all
working again.  The, over the past year I sort of stopped selling, or
working on the accounting and the Training has saturated its market, so I
don't think my site has had a "purchasing" hit in 6 months or even more.

The filePro back-end did everything though, including instantly printing out
a cool label (with picture of Guru thanks to Jim Asman) and completely
finished the process including posting it to my G/L.  All I had to do was
slap the label on the items ordered (which printed on the bottom of the
label) and mail it out.

Why am I telling you all this.  Well, bragging rights mostly that I was able
to throw away the bad web programmer's crappy code and write my own... but
more to say it *is* all possible.  However, the rotten thing I'm going to
say is I would *never* want to do it again. Just too hard and unmanageable.
If I were to have to write it again, I wouldn't even start with the WebPub.
On this system, I have the luxury of keeping a filePro right on the web
server itself... which I rent from Verio for a very cheap $105/motnh.  It is
a full free-BSD system I get complete root-level control of... and I can
host as many sites as I want... like Jim's www.spectracolorservices.com
where you can download MKPCL before you buy it.  And a couple others as well
as the Valar Group, still working but essentially decommissioned since I've
taken my new job. www.valar.com.  

There are shopping carts pre-built with MYSQL at their heart, and that might
be the way to go. Pick up on one of these like ZenCart for example and meld
that with filePro through outputting various files at the correct time.  But
do yourself a favor and know PHP.  My getting involved with someone who
really didn't know this language stretched my development time by about 12
weeks, and this at a critical time when I was ready to sell the products
without wasting this time. 

I dislike PHP so much now.. .that I barely glanced over the last, recent
thread about it here.  If you have to learn a huge protocol or language or
whatever you call that mess... to accomplish a web site, do yourself a favor
and learn PERL or PYTHON>  I'm finding that I really like PYTHON when I have
time to learn and play with it. There are good books on it like Learning
Python for Beginners.... just Google around.  I got mine from bookshare.org,
a site that lets blind folks download most books done in daisy format by a
robot voice. (i.e., scanned and read by a synthesizer.)

I'm sorry to make you read this with not too many suggestions that will help
you get directly to a web shopping cart interface to filePro.  I have heard
off and on about Bruce Eaton working on a really nice web thing for filePro
but I don't know if it is ready, or even if it has any kind of shopping cart
capability built in... I think it just interfaces web and filePro in some
slick way... haven't seen it yet. Bruce works at STN.  www.stn.com ???   he
reads and contributes to this list and should see this and respond.

Anyway, good luck.

John

No spell check. Spell checking is for sissy's!




> -----Original Message-----
> From: filepro-list-bounces+john=valar.com at lists.celestial.com
> [mailto:filepro-list-bounces+john=valar.com at lists.celestial.com] On Behalf
> Of Fairlight
> Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2008 8:26 PM
> To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
> Subject: Re: OT: shopping cart on OSR 507 + filepro
> 
> Yo, homey, in case you don' be listenin', Enrique Arredondo done said:
> > Has anyone developed a web application using fpweb and filepro to run a
> > shopping cart so I can incorporate into my webpages that I currently use
> ?
> 
> I think the safe answer is no.  I would have been the most likely
> candidate
> around here to do it, and the market wasn't there.  If Jose hasn't done
> one either, I think it's a fair bet that none exists.  At least not within
> this community.
> 
> mark->
> _______________________________________________
> Filepro-list mailing list
> Filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
> http://mailman.celestial.com/mailman/listinfo/filepro-list