I asked a friend of mine to write a php shopping basket I could use with Etomite. He prefers asp but I thought I could probably use asp within etomite, at least a call to a seperate link that then fired up the asp.
Either way with all the PHP shopping carts around I knew it must be possible. (I only wanted a shopping basket and checkout, not a whole shop/stock system, the actual product pages I intended to lovingly create myself individually and categories would be a sinch with list docs etc.) OS Commerce et al are all easy to set up but a pain to use. As flexible as a brick.
Anyway, This is what he said. (The jaromatherapy site refferred to was supposed to be my wife's website but has instead turned into my etomite playground.)
I've had a play around with some PHP code snippets on the Jaromatherapy site, and there seems to be an issue with session state, which I think is going to make it very difficult (maybe impossible) to set up a shopping cart in this way.
A simple way to demonstrate the problem is to create a simple snippet based on this example: fluidthoughts.com/howto/php/session_counter
</quote>
Here is the code he refers to;
<code>
session_start();
session_register("count");
if (!isset($_SESSION))
{
$_SESSION["count"] = 0;
echo "<p>Counter initialized</p>\n";
}
else { $_SESSION["count"]++; }
echo "<p>The counter is now <b>$_SESSION[count]</b></p>".
"<p>please reload this page to increment</p>";
$Id: session_counter.php,v 1.3 2002/08/30 04:14:14 willn Exp $
</code>
He reads as a bit patronising here but he is talking to me - a php beginner.
<quote>
Which just counts how many times the page has been reloaded by the current browser session.
Opening a new browser window and pointing at the same URL resets the counter to 0 as we would expect.
Running the code as a snippet in Jaromatherapy though has erratic results which I think are caused by the way the CMS interprets the snippets, and worst of all, opening a new browser window and reloading the site doesn't reset the counter! In other words the Jaromatherapy site doesn't distinguish between the two sessions.
</quote>
And this is the really important bit;
<Quote>This makes a shopping cart system a non starter if we use code snippets, and I don't think there is another way to do it if you want to retain control over the look and feel of each product page with the Etomite CMS...
</Quote>
Sorry for the long post. Any opinions would be gratefully recieved.
Thanks
Paul
Edited by PaulD, 30 July 2006 - 09:05 PM.
