PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide

17 Example—E-Commerce

In this, the final chapter of the book, I’ll develop one last Web application, an e-commerce site. In this example, I’ll design a site for the purpose of selling prints of art. Unfortunately, to write and explain the entire application would require a book in itself. Furthermore, some aspects of e-commerce—like how you handle the money—are extremely particular to each individual site. Trying to demonstrate such a process would be a waste of space. With these restrictions in mind, the focus in this chapter is on the core functionality of an e-commerce site: designing the database, populating a catalog as an administrator, displaying products to the public, creating a shopping cart, and storing orders in a database.