On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 12:00 PM, Merrill Oveson <[email protected]> wrote: > Phpers: > > How hard to build a shopping cart from scratch? > > It feel like if I download and use mangento or zencart that I get way > way more than I want. > > I really want to control the number of tables I have and just send the > info to the merchant account and get back an approval or not. > > thoughts?
If you primarily want something to handle the payment approval, you probably don't want a shopping cart. You want an API/SDK for your payment processing gateway (i.e. Authorize.net). Building a "custom cart" system isn't too bad if you've got a well-defined and simplified scope. For example, a very limited number of products, or something like subscriptions or memberships instead of normal retail, would be simplified to me. The biggest pains of building a custom cart from scratch IMHO are rebuilding all the logic for managing products in the database, managing carts as people add/edit/remove items, and all the forms that you've built a thousand times (shipping/billing addresses, etc). If you really wanted a full-on general purpose shopping cart system, I'd recommend downloading one and using it instead of building your own. In a case like that, it's easier to disable/hide functionality you don't want to use in something like Magento than it is to build all the pieces that you do want. If you're familiar with a framework of some kind (cakephp, codeigniter, etc.) that is probably a great place to start and would eliminate the most tedious aspects. Partly it depends on why you want to "control the number of tables" - if it's for performance, that usually won't make much difference until you get really large scale, even with something massive like Magento, and most sites simply don't have that level of traffic. Other reasons might be more "negotiable" when it comes down to it, when you weigh the costs of development time vs the costs of having a few more tables in an out-of-the-box cart. Thanks, Mac -- Mac Newbold [email protected] 801-694-6334 _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
