Please help a noob with a delivery management / recurring orders nightmare!

[retro]

I have already posted this question on another forum, but whilst I patiently await a reply, I thought it would do no harm to ask on this forum, too!  I would browse the site, but alas I see it is being redesigned.  I tried searching the forums, but unfortunately I didn't find anything of use to me - those hits that may have been had no answers... or I'm just not using the right keyword terminology!

 

I'm not looking for an easy way to just use a script or get someone to do it - I want to understand what I'm doing and why.  Advice and links to tutorials would be of most use, I'd imagine!

 

Anyway, I might as well just paste the same message ad verbatim.....

 

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I think I should point out first that my programming background is in oldschool BASIC and machine code, and in modern times VB.net. I have agreed to help a friend develop a site, and have been rather thrown in at the deep end! I did some preliminary beginner's reading on PHP last year, some of which has stuck although I have a memory like a sieve!

 

The site is, to all intents and purposes, pretty basic. This is good for me, as I have a deadline of... actually it was today, so I need to try and get this completed over the weekend! It is to be used for entering orders (like a shopping cart without the payment part) and creating daily delivery lists, which are used to pack the van. I should point out that the site is not for public use, so it doesn't need seperate public and administrative sections. Incidentally, the site will run on a Windows server, which I believe is running the latest PHP and MySQL.

 

I'll divide this into the sections I envisage:

 

Section 1 - Customer List

Pretty straightforward - a customer database, with names, addresses, phone numbers etc. It should be possible to add/edit/delete customers. Basically, a bog standard customer database. (I have written one of these based on an old script, it seems to work but the original author doesn't recommend using it any more! So if anyone has any suggestions as to a customer database tutorial....)

 

Section 2a - Add Items to Order

For now, I want to keep things extremely simple. Rather than a browsable shopping cart system, I just want three text boxes, which would be labelled Item, Price and Quantity. I think the contents are self explanatory! A method of selecting a customer, e.g. a combo box, should be included. There would then be a Submit button, which would add the item to a list (or cart, if you like).

 

Section 2b - Review & Submit Order

Once the user has finished adding items, they should be able to view their order - just like a shopping cart. They should be able to edit mistakes here. However, before submitting, a few more details need to be ascertained. Firstly, the delivery date must be entered. Secondly, a frequency of delivery should be entered (e.g. it may be a one-off, weekly, fortnightly or monthly delivery). After this, a Submit button would enter the order into the system.

 

Section 3 - Create Reports

This section should be filterable by date. It should create a report for the day with the order including prices and a total, then name and address of the customer. There should be a Print button.

 

All, in all, I guess this is pretty simple. I'm just stuck for ideas on how to put it all together! I could probably use my customer database. I'm not too sure how to do the 'cart' like part (a tutorial on how the theory behind this works would be good!!), and I'm REALLY stuck on how to get it to automatically repeat an order every week (or whatever the specified amount). I guess on top of that, they need to be able to stop the recurring order. I know that part of this is database design - something I am admittedly not great with. I hope this doesn't go beyond the scope of this forum!

 

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. If you can recommend a tutorial or a script that I should look at, that would be great! I don't really fancy using a full-blown shopping cart - they are rather bloated for what I need, and I don't need any of the logging in stuff etc. Sorry for my noobishness - I hope I explained myself clearly enough!

 

Thanks in advance for any help given.