VbzCart

Navigation

computing: software: web: shopping carts: VbzCart

Introduction

Having evaluated osCommerce (and, later, ZenCart) and found that, although it had many features I would like to have on vbz.net, it also lacked some crucial features currently needed (many of which are provided by the existing shopping cart system, and some of which would be needed in order to effectively manage porting the data from the existing system).

So I'm writing a new system, in PHP (originally started in Perl, but needed PHP for interfacing with MediaWiki) and MySQL, based on the data design of the existing VBZ cart system and adding new pieces as needed.

I will be taking notes on this page and gradually refining them into something resembling documentation, with the ultimate goal of producing a system which could be released under an open source license.

--Woozle 21:42, 1 July 2007 (EDT)

Status / History

VbzCart is very much in a pre-alpha state of development, although it is nonetheless being used in a production environment (i.e. vbz.net). The original, working version began with a simple shopping-cart system in clumsily-written Perl in approximately 1996 and added order management functions using MS Access 97 in approximately 1999. It was essentially "complete" by the early 2000s -- though the codebase grew more or less continually from 1996 onward as new areas of functionality were designed and added, so there is no clear point at which it was "finished". The MS Access platform (at least as of MS Access 97) does not really lend itself to distribution of applications, however, so in another sense that version was "unfinishable".

The database was migrated to MySQL over a couple of years, starting with the stock data and finishing sometime in 2010 with some auxiliary tables. The management functions, which were at first still using MS Access as a front end for the MySQL data, were recoded as a PHP-based web interface from approximately 2009-2010 (still in progress as of November, 2010).

Documents

• Data design:
  • /tables: all tables used by VbzCart
  • /procs: stored procedures
  • /queries
• Code:
  • /code
• Data concepts:
  • Carts
  • Orders
  • Sessions
• Subsystems:
  • /catalog/building: how the catalog is built from stock and supplier catalogs
  • /checkout: notes on the checkout subsystem
  • ordering: how ordering works (carts, orders, etc.)
• Archival notes:
  • /obsolete: large chunks of documentation which have become obsolete
    • /obsolete/stored procedures: ended up not using these because they can't report back in detail
  • VbzCart tables in MS Access: the data schema in the MS Access version (2006)
  • VbzCart wikified topics: using MediaWiki to manage store topics
  • VbzCart shelved ideas: concepts and code which might be useful later but aren't worth it right now
  • VbzCart uses HyperAdmin for administration of privileged users The admin code uses MediaWiki for user access control, but could be ported to other environments. The standalone store does have its own security system, which is partly documented here.
  • VbzCart SQL: for building schema; automatically generated from above pages needs to be rewritten
  • Pages still on VbzWiki will eventually be ported here, except for vbz.net-specific items.

Links

• International Address Formats: reference for how addresses should be formatted for different countries