Freeway, databases and...

Freeway
1

… well, how do I?

I have a project where, essentially, I’m presenting a gallery of around 300 images to choose from, the chosen image from which will be printed, framed and sent to the customer.

I have absolutely no idea where to go with this, so please forgive my idiot questions. I tried a search of the list, but the answers to previous threads didn’t quite meet with my specifications, or went completely over my head.

I’d like it to work like this:

  1. Visitor to the site searches for images that meet various basic criteria, eg image style, orientation, colour balance, etc.

  2. And/or visitor picks from various lists of images under categories such as “landscape”, “abstract”, “water”, “photographer”, etc.

  3. From those choices, a series of thumbnails is presented, each of which has a description and leads to a larger pop-up window version.

  4. Visitor chooses their preferred image, and is taken to the next level where they choose the output size, material to be printed on, and the framing and delivery options.

  5. The rest is pretty much a standard shopping basket, I guess (if there is such a thing!).

I think my problem is I don’t know how I get the several hundred images into the site so they can be searched and sorted. My simple research tells me the server side does a lot (MySQL rings lots of bells), but that’s all I know.

What do I do next, as simply and as idiot-proof as possible for a complete database numpty like me?

We’re hosting on Have-Host, so I know a lot of the back office stuff is available. I need the bit between my ideas, layout in Freeway and getting it all to work!

Thanks

Heather

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2

Well, the absolute easiest way to do this from a programming
standpoint would be to use one of the pre-installed shopping cart
systems on your server. That said, it will be extremely difficult for
a hand-coding novice to make it look like anything besides what it
looks like out of the (virtual) box. But I imagine that if you wanted
to get going very quickly, using OSCommerce or Fishcart SQL or one of
the other cart systems would get you the catalog overview page,
product detail page, size choice, cart, checkout, and all the
trimmings pretty much for free. You would sign in as an admin, upload
sized images of each product, assign product order codes, prices, etc.
and hook the commerce part up to your bank or PayPal.

The other way to do this would be a much harder vertical climb, with
the benefit that you would know how it all worked inside, and could
build another one for someone else, and it would look precisely the
way you wanted it to with no compromise.

But you will have to judge whether the effort of coding such a beast
from scratch is worth the expenditure of your time when offset by the
fee. I made this same choice many years ago when I was building the
Softpress Store. I ended up spending twice or three times as long as I
bid (and was paid) to build it, but at the time I was still learning,
and I considered it valuable tuition. That investment has paid off a
thousand-fold since then.

If you want to build it from scratch, say the word on Dynamo, and
(speaking for myself, anyway) you will get all the free support you
can stand.

As such things stand, what you’ve sketched out here is a very low-
hanging piece of fruit. You have a limited universe of products, a
limited number of variations of those products, and no discounts or
direct download or the countless other details that mire a more
complex system. Most of this could be hard-coded in a single include
file, with a few database tables to hold the stuff that changes –
individual photos, customer information, and successful transaction
confirmation codes – and then included into your Freeway layout,
where you would design the three or four page templates listed above
to match your site.

Walter

On Dec 10, 2008, at 7:20 AM, Heather Kavanagh wrote:

… well, how do I?

I have a project where, essentially, I’m presenting a gallery of
around 300 images to choose from, the chosen image from which will
be printed, framed and sent to the customer.

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3

On 10 Dec 2008, at 13:03, Walter Lee Davis wrote:

If you want to build it from scratch, say the word on Dynamo, and
(speaking for myself, anyway) you will get all the free support you
can stand.

Now that is an offer very hard to refuse - I am treating this project
as a learning curve for when the customers ask for the same sort of
thing. At the very least, I will have an idea of what it takes so I
can offer advice.

There is little or no budget available for off-the-shelf systems. I
did have a look at OSCommerce and the price, while not huge in the
overall scheme of things, was more than I have available (pretty much
nothing, to be honest).

As such things stand, what you’ve sketched out here is a very low-
hanging piece of fruit. You have a limited universe of products, a
limited number of variations of those products, and no discounts or
direct download or the countless other details that mire a more
complex system. Most of this could be hard-coded in a single include
file…

While I have an allergy to most things code, I think this is a path I
should follow to see how it works. I suppose it all kind of depends on
my workload in other areas of the business as to how much time I can
devote to the thing.

So, I shall stick my head over in the Dynamo list and see what happens.

Thanks, Walter.

Heather

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4

OSCommerce is Free (you just need the appropriate hosting account to run it correctly - its one of a few shopping carts we have)

On 10 Dec 2008, at 13:26, Heather Kavanagh wrote:

I did have a look at OSCommerce and the price

David Owen
Freeway Friendly Web hosting and Domains ::

http://www.ineedwebhosting.co.uk

http://www.ineedwebhosting.co.uk/blog

5

On 10 Dec 2008, at 13:40, David Owen wrote:

OSCommerce is Free (you just need the appropriate hosting account
to run it correctly - its one of a few shopping carts we have)

Oh, perhaps I got muddled there (good start!). I like the sound of free.

=o)

Heather

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