We just updated our shopping cart tutorial – check it out:

I just added 3 new screencasts to the KillerSites University under the PHP > PHP Shopping Cart course (about 45 minutes of content.)

These videos answer a common question: how to change the code created in the course to use a MySQL database rather than an XML file to store product information. For small stores, using an XML file makes sense, but if you intend to expand and there is the potential that you’ll have a large number of products to sell, editing an XML file every time may be a bit unwieldy.

These videos cover how to change existing code only. With a MySQL database in place, however, you could add on to the functionality by adding a password protected administrative section that allows you to add/edit/delete products from the database. These videos don’t cover that (yet, at least), but if you watch the series on PHP CRUD with MySQLi and the series I did on creating a basic user authentication system with PHP, that should help get you started.

Let me know if there are any other features you’d like to see added to the PHP Shopping Cart course, and I’ll see what I can do. Hope you find the videos useful. =)

Ben

These videos can be found in the Killersites Universities’ video library.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

Hi,

We just released a new screencast on building a login system with PHP. Our official release notes:

This six part video series explains how to create a simple PHP login system using PHP, MySQLi, PHP sessions and a variation of the MVC pattern. This system allows authorized members to login, access a member’s only section, and log out, as well as showing how to create a form that adds new members to the database.

This video course, along with hundreds of other videos on PHP and web design, can be found in the Killersites University … our video tutorial subscription service.

I will be releasing free sample videos from this course very soon.

Stefan Mischook
www.killerphp.com

Hi,

Sometimes I post questions that are put to me by people. This is a beginners question, so you experienced nerds will want to move on. Nonetheless, I am sure there are a few debutant PHP programmers who will find this useful.

The question:

So in a nutshell, what is the difference between PHP 5 and CRUD?

PHP5 is just a version of PHP. Whereas CRUD is short for a series of PHP+MySQL operations/interactions:

- Create
- Read
- Update
- Delete

…These are the core operations that can be preformed on a database. CRUD is so important in fact, that we just released a mini video series on PHP CRUD that can now be found in the Killersites University … our video tutorial subscription service.

Stefan.

Hi,

We just released a couple of new videos at Killersites University:

These two videos show how to modify the view.php file we created earlier in Part 1 of the ‘CRUD Basics with MySQLi & PHP‘ series to add basic pagination. This functionality is often required for large data sets, providing a better user experience by splitting up a long list of records into multiple pages. These videos briefly introduce the MySQLi data_seek() function, used to pull specific records from the database.

Free samples will be coming out soon.

Stefan Mischook
www.killerphp.com