.. every web designer should learn at least some basic PHP.
For a lot of people new to web programming, the ability to create a shopping cart is a must!
... After months of ignoring request, I finally decided to put out a video tutorial on how to create a shopping cart with PHP.
I didn't do this particular video myself (I got my right-hand-man Jon to do it) ... but being the control freak that I am, the video lessons were put together with the killersites philosophy in mind: Keep it simple, practical and get to the point!
In this series of videos, you learn how to build a PHP based shopping cart that works with Paypal. Some highlights:
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
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.
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).
Using XML as our data storage format, we're going to create a catalog of items for our shopping cart.
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.
With our catalog completed, we're going to tidy up – or refactor – our project and get ready to build the ShoppingCart object.
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.
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.
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.
Now that we have the individual items lined up in our checkout page, we can add the shipping costs.
We're finally done writing our shopping cart class! Now we can put it to work with our newly created checkout page.
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.
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.
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.
I love giving away videos, but we need to pay the bills around here too ...
:)
So you can get the entire video course on creating a shopping cart with PHP etc ... for practically nothing! Oh yea, when you buy the videos, you get all the source code too.
For download:
On DVD:
Thanks for supporting killerphp.com.
Just post them on the PHP forum.
