SaranacLake

Well, my site is built like an online newspaper like the NYT where 60%+ of the site requires a subscription to access "premium content" so it's not segmented quite like you're saying where there would just be one section where subscriptions would apply. However, if you try to access "premium" content (e.g. exclusive interview), I certainly will throw up a way to buy a subscription, though. Just to I understand, are you against putting subscriptions in the store because a.) it's confusing, b.) people won't take advantage of it, or c.) it will create a lot of extra work? Fwiw, subscriptions are already designed into the store, and I could just limit things to one subscription per checkout which wouldn't be too much extra work. Then it is there to cross-sell, and limiting one subscription will make things much easier as far as my design. Also, because you may be wondering, I am planning to offer gift cards and gift subscriptions, so in that case, people can buy as many as they want. (I still have to design this part.)

At the top of most pages on my site is a top menu bar, and sitting on top of that and to the far right there is a "Subscribe Now" button for users who aren't logged in or who are not yet members. (You get a "Renew Now" button 30 days before your subscription expires if you are logged in.) Like this... Then, at the right of my top menu I have a "Store" option - like where "video" is above. Because of the close physical proximity, I can see a person navigating to either, although if you ONLY wanted to subscribe, then a button labeled "Subscribe Now" would be the place to go. But in a larger sense, I have always seen my store"as a place to sell "Products" (e.g. books, T-shirts) and "Services" (e.g. subscriptions, podcasts, etc). And originally I thought it would be nice to have subscriptions in my store because MAYBE a person clicks on "Store" to check out books and then they see subscriptions as well, and they end up buying one or the other or both?! (Which ties back to my earlier statement of making it as easy as possible for customers to buy things...) The goal is to have a store that is like Amazon.com in that it has everything you need - just obviously not that big! Yeah. Well, when you choose "Subscribe Now", after they choose a subscription type, I do add it to the shopping cart, but in that flow I just go immediately to checkout, as my goal is to get their $$$ as soon as I can and get them their site access. Therefore, I don't add an obvious path to keep shopping, although technically I guess theyc ould. (Still think through all of the different paths you can take!) The store is more intended to let people search and browse and hopefully add several things, including possibly a subscription. (If you are looking at books, and see that I offer subscriptions, I had originally thought it a good idea to let people buy things in ONE stop. (I just don't want to allow people to buy multiple subscriptions in one sitting - which mainly ties back to my other thread where I am still leaning towards limiting accounts to a credit card. And even if I did allow that, it is illogical to let 5 people all set up individual accounts at once, because that just isn't how it works most times in real life!) Well, I just spent the last few days how to do super/subtypes in MySQL, so my website will scale to sell anything from subscriptions to books to tractors or music or pizza!

I wondered about that. So me trying to be helpful to my potential customers, apparently not only creates a pain for me from a design standpoint, but you are saying really isn't necessary, eh? That would definitely be easier, it's just that I had always heard, "Don't tell customers how to buy things from you, just allow them to shop and purchase as they like."

I have *never* posted anything about the above question until now! So what are you talking about? Clearly you've developed some deep-seated anger towards me, which is a surprise, because you've been very helpful in the past. If I upset you so much, then best to skip my threads moving forward...

I am working on the e-commerce portion of my website that sells online subscriptions, books, gear, etc. My desk is covered with ERD's right nw, and I thought I had things pretty much figured out, but discovered a curve ball... Originally for subscriptions, I did this... SUBSCRIPTION_DETAILS - id - member_id - plan_id - purchased_on - subscription_start_date - subscription_end_date - purchase_price and so on... But after I mapped out the tables related to ordering (i.e. MEMBER, ORDER, ORDER_DETAILS, PRODUCT) it occurred to me that I have two annoying issues... Issue #1: Some of the fields in SUBSCRIPTION_DETAILS really could be moved, for example... subscription_details.purchased_on ===> order.ordered_on subscription_details.purchase_price ===> order_details.purchase_price Issue #2: Currently I have no linkage between my ORDER and SUBSCRIPTION_DETAILS. Questions: a.) Would it be the end of the world to have duplicate fields and when a person subscribes, just write the fields in Issue #1 to two places? (The ORDER / ORDER_DETAILS tables help keep track of a purchase. And the SUBSCRIPTION_DETAILS table help s keep track of members' subscriptions. They are related in some ways, yet moreso separate.) I could move those fields to one place as mentioned above, but then that makes querying things to calculate things like renewal costs and stuff a real PITA. I could also put an "Order_No" in the SUBSCRIPTION_DETAILS table as a cross-reference, but again, that makes querying things a lot more work. (I have a fairly elaborate way of calculating subscription and renewal pricing, which is why I subconsciously put all of those fields originally in my SUSBCRIPTION_DETILS table!

OMG! Crafting well thought out business logic is such a PITA sometimes! I am working on an ecommerce site that sells subscriptions, books, gear, etc. Similar to a lot of online newspapers, I have a "Subscribe" button in my website mast where people can buy a subscription. After clicking on that button, the user is first presented with different subscription offers (e.g. sliver, gold, platinum), and then I have a one-page checkout form where they create an account - kind of important for an online subscription! - and they pay with a credit card. Easy! Trying to be a nice guy, I decided to add the ability to choose a subscription from my online store as well. (Presumably you want to offer as many ways for people to buy things from you as possible, right?) Well here is the issue I just discovered... What happens if a person is browsing through my product catalog, and they add multiple subscriptions to their shopping cart? Of course I would welcome the extra $$$, but I just realized that would break how people create their accounts and pay, because above I assume that ONE person, buys ONE subscription and pays for it in ONE transaction. So my questions is, "Would it be a mortal sin to limit people to buying only ONE subscription at a time if they do so while in my online store?" I would hope that people would get that, but as we know, users do some crazy stuff!! In fairness, if you went to buy a subscription at the Wall Street Journal or any other large newspaper/magazine, you would be forced to do one subscription per transaction. I am just wondering what happens if someone goes on a shopping spree in my online store, buys several books, some t-shirts, and decides he/she also wants to buy 5 subscriptions on the spot. Thoughts?

So what do you use? Well the main thing I would like moving forward is the ability to create ERDs. Right now I am drawing out my entire system on paper, which is fine, but when you have 50-100 tables, and you want to be able to quickly see a topology of your whole data model, I am thinking having a data modeling tool would be better. There would also be the benefit, in theory, or forward and reverse-engineering from your ERDs. Well, locally for dev I use MAMP. So how hard would it be to hook up Workbench to point to my MAMP instance? (And are there any security consdierations?) Well, I have a VPS,on I believe that cPanel comes with a way to interface with MySQL - it could very well be phpMyAdmin, but I forget. And since you bring this up, do you have any advice and a "workflow" for how I should work moving forward? Because I do not have a live business/website yet, I can just do everything locally on my laptop using MAMP. But moving forward, I will need to find an easy way to take what I have on my laptop in MAMP and promote it to production on my VPS. (That could probably be a thread or two on its own!) Any suggestions?

Does anyone have experience using MySQL Workbench? I have been using phpMyAdmin to manage my database, but know that this application seems to draw lots of hatred from people?! 😮 If setting up and learning how to use Workbench is going to take LOTS of time, then I will save it for v2.0 of my website which is almost done. But if it is super easy to install and use, then I am thinking it might be worth it, since the e-commerce portion of my website has lots of tables, and I would like a way to visualize things - which phpMyAdmin doesn't really offer. Thoughts?

Why do you do this? I ask a specific question, and now you are giving me data modeling lessons? Stop twisting what I asked for into something it's not.

Wrong concept. Not the start and end date of a specific contract. The term of a generic contract. Think "annual subscription", "one-month trial", etc.

Is it necessary to have the units of measurement in a column name? I want to add the column "contract_term" to my table, but it will store things in terms of MONTHS, so an annual membership would have a value of 12. (This is easier than needing a second column for units or dealing with decimals.) I could have "contract_term_mths" but that sorta looks weird. Thoughts?

Aha. Okay. (So if user went to an e-commerce site that just submitted the product_price to the server and had no validation (e.g. <> 0), then he/she could get a hell of a deal on something, right?) Okay. Since I don't know Javascript, I guess that doesn't mean much to me right now, but hopefully some day it will?! So, presumably, PHP's choice of session variable length is sufficiently long to prevent that issue, right? Are there other things you can do to protect session data? And would using https help in any way?

Okay, I see that now, but I don't have a do/type/lastSessID/csrf key. I just see hidden_field If I change the <input value== > using the Inspector and resubmit the form, then I assume it would submit that new value to the server, right? I looked under DOM, but there were tons of attributes and things seem to repeat several times - it was impossible to fugure out what was of value or where to change things! How would I add a breakpoint and mimic what you did on your niece's school site on the code @maxxd provided? (I know how to step though my PHP using NetBeans, but not in Firefox Dev Tools.) I thought maybe you were an ethical hacker or something? Also, I thought when I was poking around - forget where now - that I saw the Session ID. What is to stop a user or hacker from screwing with that?

I went under Firefox > Developer Tools > Network and then I clicked the "Submit Query" button on my form and Firefox shows a POST and a GET method. Where do I go to see what was submitted? And how would I change that? So where did you learn how to do that?

Just tried this out, and that is pretty cool!! 😃 So you can edit the HTML with Firefox's Developer Tools, but is there a way to fiddle with the PHP? (Presumably not, because the PHP is on the server...) Also, is there a way to reset the $_POST variable? So with this hack, they can alter what information gets submitted in the form, but it's not like they can read what was submitted, right?

@maxxd I don't have access to my dev environment right now, but it sounds like you are saying that in Firefox Developer Tools I would be able to see all of the HTML form elements in the tool? Because if a field is "hidden" you wouldn't be able to see it on the actual form. Is that what you are saying? (I'll try your example later, just wanted to clarify while you are here.) Yeah, good point. Is there a way to make it so they cannot discover things like the "product_id" in a hidden field? Any ways to protect things better?

I'm sorry I'm asking such newbie questions, but I have even forgotten HTML?! As I recall, when you submit an HTML form, each field/control have a "name=" attribute, right? So if your had a form with "First Name" and "Last name", then you'd have two fields, each with it's own "name=" right? In this case, I guess I might have a text-box where the user would enter a "Quantity" so that will have a "name=", right? And then there will be my "Add to cart" button. Now does that have a "name=" as well where I can pass the "Product ID" or would I need to use a hidden field to help pass the "Product ID"? (I'm not trying to decive the customer, I am just trying to recall how and where to pass the values so they show up in my $_POST array. Can you explain a little more how they would do that if I had a hidden "Price" field? (Not trying to be a hacker, just to understand how hackers would take over!) Also, if a user or hacker could manipulate a hidden "Price" field, then couldn't they do the same thing with the "Product ID"?

The only time I need to use a hidden HTML field is if I have to submit multiple values or some special value related to the form itself, rigt? So I think I can just submit the "price_id" using the name= in the HTML form control and that will get passed with my $_POST array, right? (Sorry, I have been away from all of this for like 4 years!!)

I guess when the user chooses a product and clicks "Add to Cart" it would be better to send a "product_id" instead, right?

I am getting ready to code my e-commerce module, and could use some helping figuring out how to submit the product price. On the product details page, if I have a button called "Add to Cart", would I want to use a hidden HTML field to submit the "product_price"?

Okay, I see. Okay. Oh, right. I remember those now. I see your point. I think you missed the end of my last response... Are you hinting at... RewriteRule /shop/([^/]+)(/)?$ /shop/product-catalog.php?category=$1 [L, QSA] I think that addresses your concern about "/movie/and/something/else/", right?

If the URL is always coming from a hyperlink then is it much concern? (I don't expect people to type in the URL, although they could.) Are you wanting something like this? RewriteRule /shop/(.+)(/)?$ /shop/product-catalog.php?category=$1 [L, QSA] Not sure I understand what you mean here... A period (.) means "any character". A plus sign (+) means "one or more". Is your problem with requiring at least one character? Well, there is no category for "movie/and/more" Are you hinting at... RewriteRule /shop/([^/]+)(/)?$ /shop/product-catalog.php?category=$1 [L, QSA]

How about this... Pretty URL: /shop/movies/?view=listing

Okay, but i'm a little sure of the syntax to apply your suggestions. Pretty URL: /shop/movies/?view=listing Do I need an ampersand (&) here instead of a question mark (?) Ugly URL: /shop/product-catalog.php?category=movies&view=listing And not sure about the mod_rewrite... RewriteRule /shop/(.+)/________ /shop/product-catalog.php?category=$1&view=$2 [L] How do I get ?view=listing into variable $2??

So if I am going to do pretty URLs, then save them for where things are organized much like a filing system? And then leave things like sorting, filtering, product attributes for the query string?