Hi,

After teasing you guys for a week or so, I’ve released the entire video tutorial course on building a PHP based shopping cart.

There is a small charge ($19.99) to download the entire course, but it is more than worth it since you get 140 minutes of top notch nerd training … and we include the source code too.

The course outline:

PART 1: INTRODUCTION
Duration: 4:49

We’ll quickly go through what the end result our project is supposed to look like and some of the tools that will help us get there.

PART 2: TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW
Duration: 10:42

A better look at the technologies as well as some of the tools we’re going to be used to build our PayPal shopping cart. We’ll also do a bit of refactoring and explain some of the benefits of using an IDE (integrated development environment).

PART 3: BUILDING AN XML CATALOG
Duration: 17:22

Using XML as our data storage format, we’re going to create a catalog of items for our shopping cart.

PART 4: BUILDING THE CATALOG PAGE
Duration: 15:30

We’re going to put some skin on that catalog and start making it look a little more like a page to buy items and a little less like the index of a phone book.

PART 5: FINISHING THE CATALOG TEMPLATE
Duration: 12:54

With our catalog completed, we’re going to tidy up – or refactor – our project and get ready to build the ShoppingCart object.

PART 6: MAKING AN “ADD TO CART” PAGE
Duration: 15:58

We’ll cover how we can use the $_SESSION array in PHP to store our customer’s order as they navigate our website and add items to the shopping cart. We’ll also start building the Shopping Cart class and look at some object-oriented programming concepts.

PART 7: BUILDING THE SHOPPING CART
Duration: 15:54

We will be adding the major functionality of our shopping cart class in this video and getting it ready for calculating subtotals and totals with shipping costs.

PART 8: CALCULATING COST
Duration: 7:37

We’ll be creating templates for our checkout page in order to have a proper line-item for each product with the necessary cost details.

PART 9: SHIPPING COST
Duration: 10:09

Now that we have the individual items lined up in our checkout page, we can add the shipping costs.

PART 10: FINISHING THE CART TEMPLATE
Duration: 8:38

We’re finally done writing our shopping cart class! Now we can put it to work with our newly created checkout page.

PART 11: SENDING DATA TO PAYPAL
Duration: 11:36

PayPal requires a collection of preset hidden form elements on form submission. These elements act as the glue between our shopping cart and their website, and we’re going to flush them out in this video.

PART 12: PAYPAL SANDBOX INTEGRATION
Duration: 12:31

We’re going to go through the steps needed to create a PayPal Sandbox account. This tool lets us complete transactions without having to pass money through PayPal.

PART 13: A QUICK LOOK AT PAYPAL’S IPN
Duration: 5:47

PayPal’s IPN (Instant Payment Notification) is a handy way of knowing when a transaction has been completed succesfully. We’ll quickly go over how we can pick up data collected by PayPal and how it can be used to track orders after they’ve been placed.

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Should you have any questions or comments, please feel to post them.

PS: I will have more new FREE PHP and Dreamweaver CS4 videos coming out soon.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

Hi,

I just released a new PHP shopping cart video tutorial for beginners. In this series of videos, you learn how to build a PHP based shopping cart that works with Paypal. Some highlights:

• It’s object oriented – almost!
• The shopping cart ‘talks’ to Paypal.
• Learn how to create XML documents and how to process them with PHP.
• You also learn a few ‘best practices’ when it comes to programming.

I hope you enjoy.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com