I have been working on setting up an online store with osCommerce, and it is going remarkably well. The shop is entered via a Freeway website.
Visitors to the main Freeway site can simply register just their email address to receive newsletters - this is done via the php Feedback form action. If they enter the shop part of the site, they will also be able to register on there with more details such as name, address, telephone numbers etc etc - and it would be good to keep those two registration options available to visitors. Not everyone will want to give their full details if all they want is the newsletter.
My client would like to be able to create an e-mailing list using these details, but of course one method just emails the registrants details to my client, and another populates the existing MySQL via the osCommerce shop front.
Is there a way I can utilise the MySQL database and populate it via the php Feedback form method, so all details are stored in the same place?
I would caution against this, unless you really understand the
internals of OSCommerce. There may be dependencies in there that you
can’t anticipate or control. Adding new records without purchases may
trigger some process or another that causes them to be garbage-
collected later, losing all of your new contacts.
What you could do pretty simply would be to create a view that merges
both a stand-alone contact database with the list of purchasers from
OSCommerce. This would be a read-only peek into OSCommerce, and
shouldn’t be dangerous in any way.
Walter
On Dec 17, 2008, at 11:58 AM, Jonathan Riddle wrote:
Is there a way I can utilise the MySQL database and populate it via
the php Feedback form method, so all details are stored in the same
place?
osCommerce does have a separate tab on the admin page purely for customer details, which are taken upon registration, which can be added whether a visitor makes a purchase or not.
However, I do get your point that the inner workings of the database may get thrown if details are added in a way other than via the shop registration.
On 17 Dec 2008, 3:59 pm, Jonathan Riddle wrote:
However, I do get your point that the inner workings of the database may get thrown if details are added in a way other than via the shop registration.
Will give it some more thought.
Hi Jonathan,
What did you end up doing? Did you end up utilizing any Freeway Action to get data into your database?