Need input on shopping cart using points for currency

[simcoweb]

Starting a new project whereas the products will be purchased utilizing 'loyalty points' for purchasing instead of money. Points totals are generated by another site and software. All I need to do is tap into their points totals and create a cart that subtracts what they spend on merchandise and updates the total to reflect that.

The cart will be member's only (it's a gaming site) and the products are more like 'gifts' since there's no currency exchanged. And, most likely, no shipping charged. They will need to log in using user/pass established at their gaming site.

So, questions are..should I try to take an existing cart and redo the payment/checkout system to reflect points as currency?  Or, create something from scratch since it's going to be a basic 'catalog' style with minimal full-featured cart modules in it?

Does anyone know of a set of classes that could provide the cart functionality so I can just add in the payment/checkout method?

Any ideas/pointers/etc. would be greatly appreciated! :)

[HoTDaWg]

first lesson in life buddy. help others help you. the thing i like about programming you are your own boss and you do what you feel like! No one is gonna stop you! You can hack, you can create something brilliant whatever. my point is, you gotta know what you want, and the only way to find out is to try it yourself. If you dont have the time for that, i highly suggest you sit yourself down like most programmers do and begin writing a thorough plan of how your script is gonna work, and what each page is gonna do. making a plan is the most efficient and smartest way to program. If however, you just are gathering research from our personal experience, i highly suggest you code it yourself:
1. Its a lot more fun than reading each individual file in a shopping cart script to find out what the file does
2. there is a lot more flexibility over features you can add
3. You know exactly whats going on
4. You can customize the template based upon your gaming sites template.

it also depends on how strapped for time you are. That is a key factor. But plannning your script, remember that. I wasted almost a whole year creating scripts without a plan, and it was terrible.

HoTDaWg

[simcoweb]

Thanks for the advice, HotDawg. I do prefer to code the majority of it myself. However, I am under some time constraints and having perhaps a well written class file handling the basic cart functions would be a big boost. As i've been told in these forums many time, 'don't try to reinvent the wheel'. :)

Thanks to these forums and lots of great responses to my other posts i've been able to go from total zilch to about a 5.5 within a short period of time. With help/guidance/suggestions from many of these great people i've successfully written two standalone projects plus a complete website in PHP that included registration, logins, referral tracking, file uploading, profile updating and much more. I read the forums daily to see if I can answer the questions that others post. If I can then I know that i'm learning! :)

It's always good to get some ideas on the fastest and most efficient way to code something. I guess that's what i'm looking for here. That way, like in your case, I don't spend a lot of time spinning my wheels. With the last project I posted here I was able to get solid advice on the right way to set up the database (using multiple tables and 'join' queries instead of one table, for example).

Anyway, thanks again!