Building an e-commerce site with Textpattern in two weeks (or more)

Robert L. · 2006-07-04 18:15:34

In the next couple of weeks I will be building an e-commerce site based on TXP for a friend of mine. As I have been an anonymous user of this forum for the last two years, I thought it might be interesting to share my experiences and maybe give a little something back for all the tricks, hints and help I received here.

The shop will sell wine and will have the following features:

Two-page product presentation per product;
Shopping-Cart (duh!);
Complete productlist;
Status of basket on every page (“you have x items in your basket”);
(Simple) calculation of shipping costs and discounts;
Checkout form with two possible payment options which are common in the Netherlands, (this should be easily expandable to any payment method);
E-mail confirmation of the order.

The shop will not feature:

Client database (so repeat customers will have to fill out the complete orderform again)
Order-tracking
etcetera, etcetera.

The shop will feature extensive photography of the wine in question, already dubbed as “wine pornography”. Due to this, existing shopscripts as OS-Commerce did not fit the bill.

I will use this thread to report my progress, and I will post all my solutions to the problems I will certainly have to overcome.

Next update will probably be this weekend, after I have scrutinized the available scripts and snippets of shopping-carts that are currently available.

Last edited by Robert L. (2006-07-04 22:23:28)

Robert L. · 2006-07-04 23:05:59

After studying a lot of available scripts at Hotscripts and other sources, I have decided to work with the script offered on 7-shop.de

The script offers the shopping-cart functionality I’m looking for, and can be seperated from the admin area which I’m going to replace with TXP.

The code is free to use and change, but has a few limitations:

The notes coming with the php-code are in German, as is the naming of the needed session variables;
The HTML used is heavily table-based;
The check-out and product options are too limited and need expansion for my shop;
Most important, in the various offered files PHP and HTML are heavily intertwined. This means that without rewriting the entire code I need these files as includes rather than seperate forms in TXP. Bummer. See this explained in the TXP faq under the (sub)header Escaping to HTML, halfway down the page.

The above means that my shop will probably not become a plug-in, because of the use of external files instead of forms and such, and that I have a lot of translating and rewriting to do, separating the good PHP from the ugly HTML.

If anyone already tried this with 7-shop, please let me know. I can always use some good pointers.

jm · 2006-07-05 03:41:29

I don’t have much experience with it, but Quick.Cart is fairly clean code wise (aside from CSS).

I was actually going to set out on a similar task when I get home in 2 weeks. Good luck!

Robert L. · 2006-07-05 07:54:56

I have looked at Quick.Cart, but that uses a flat file database. Converting that into working with TXP and MySQL will probably go beyond my limited PHP-skills. I can read and change PHP code, but unfortunately I can not write it myself from scratch. (Not yet, anyway).

So for now, I’m going to stick with 7-shop, but thanks for the tip!

ricoschette · 2006-09-01 15:14:29

how is that project going?
I am seeing a hard time doing similar thing :(

Robert L. · 2006-09-18 08:39:02

Hello ricoschette,

As it turned out I had to overcome some problems that I couldn’t solve within the two weeks from the topic title (and my day job got in the way, too). However, the site is nearly finished now and I am pretty proud of it.

I will have to discuss with the site owner whether or not I will show it in “Let’s See Yours, Then” when I’m finished.
The site is no longer pure textpattern; I had to parse TXP in in some other php-files that I wrote to make this project work to avoid recurring ob_start errors.

Currently I am moving a few pixels around in the templates and am finishing up the design of the orderforms; after that the site will be tested for a week and will go live.

-jw- · 2006-09-18 09:02:00

Checkout form with two possible payment options which are common in the Netherlands, (this should be easily expandable to any payment method);

Are you offering iDeal payment method? If so, what was your experience in integrating iDeal into the site? Just curious as I’m looking into a similar project and have no experience with integrating payement possibilities.

Robert L. · 2006-09-18 09:36:42

Hello Jan Willem,

At this point we will start with two payment methods (eenmalige incasso en overschrijving), iDeal will follow later.
As I understand iDeal offers some help with implementing it in your site. As I have all necessary data available in the session, it should not be too difficult to send out this information (encrypted) to the iDeal front.

Last edited by Robert L. (2006-09-20 07:17:30)

Robert L. · 2006-12-08 22:25:26

It is finished: http://www.wijnboutique.nl

slim · 2006-12-10 03:50:13

Looks good! Did you draw up the icons yourself, or get them from another source? My family heritage is Dutch, but I know none of the language. I like when it is similar to english… “Klik voor hulp”. I love it!

mrdale · 2006-12-10 04:58:42

Looks good.

And seems to work even better. congrats!

Could you give a little more detail on how you acheived the integration with TXP. I’ve been dying for an eCommerce solution for a long while.

Robert L. · 2006-12-10 07:25:24

Thanks! It took me a while to figure out, and learned a lot about PHP along the way.

Slim, the icons used are from Mark James’ Silk Icons set you can find at his site FamFamFam

mrdale, I will write about it and post some code snippets when I find the time, probably somewhere at the end of this week. I will let you know as soon as it is up.

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#1 2006-07-04 18:15:34

Building an e-commerce site with Textpattern in two weeks (or more)

#2 2006-07-04 23:05:59

Re: Building an e-commerce site with Textpattern in two weeks (or more)

#3 2006-07-05 03:41:29

Re: Building an e-commerce site with Textpattern in two weeks (or more)

#4 2006-07-05 07:54:56

Re: Building an e-commerce site with Textpattern in two weeks (or more)

#5 2006-09-01 15:14:29

Re: Building an e-commerce site with Textpattern in two weeks (or more)

#6 2006-09-18 08:39:02

Re: Building an e-commerce site with Textpattern in two weeks (or more)

#7 2006-09-18 09:02:00

Re: Building an e-commerce site with Textpattern in two weeks (or more)

#8 2006-09-18 09:36:42

Re: Building an e-commerce site with Textpattern in two weeks (or more)

#9 2006-12-08 22:25:26

Re: Building an e-commerce site with Textpattern in two weeks (or more)

#10 2006-12-10 03:50:13

Re: Building an e-commerce site with Textpattern in two weeks (or more)

#11 2006-12-10 04:58:42

Re: Building an e-commerce site with Textpattern in two weeks (or more)

#12 2006-12-10 07:25:24

Re: Building an e-commerce site with Textpattern in two weeks (or more)

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