cart suggestions

[shibbi3]

Hello Everyone,

I just wanted to get everyones opinion on this, I am looking to build an online shopping cart, would it be best to build one from scratch or to see what is out on the net and build from there?

Thanks for any suggestions!

[Gruzin]

Hi,
I'am going to write the shopping cart script right now and think the best way is to use sessions to store the user information. Something like when someone adds something to the cart, script should register the session and input the Sid in db.

Regards,
george

[nrobi]

To be honest I think it depends on a bunch of things. I'll relate my personal experience. I downloaded osCommerce then wanted to adapt it because I didn't want a cookie-cutter site so I spent hours and hours AND HOURS... trying to figure out how it worked, how the 3 or 4 dozen files fit together, memorizing god knows how many constants so I knew what to type or what they were refering to when I came across them in a script, etc, etc.

I also had my nose stuffed into O'Reilly's PHP and MySQL book, php.net, and mysql.com learning as much as I could at the same time. I found it to be really frustrating. So I then decided to write my own.

Granted it took a while but I finally finished it. There were still plenty moments of frustration but it was a lot more rewarding and I know exactly how everything works. And it fits my needs perfectly (I integrated multiple stores into one shopping cart system).

I really couldn't give you an estimate on time to complete it that's anywhere near accurate.... I'd say 4-6 months, but that's for my whole backend, not just the cart. I wouldn' call it complete either..... it works. I'm sure reading these forums I'll pick up a lot f good practices to improve upon my work. That's the one thing you don't have to worry about with osCommerce or other carts. The bugs are already worked out of them.... (I hope anyway :) ).

Hope this helped.