[Pro] submit a form from webyep with unique ID

Freeway
1

I’m creating a replacement site for a client and pushing the boundaries of what I know in the process. It’s going to have 1,000ish products on it and I’m using a combination of FW and webyep. Each of the individual product pages will be created within FW (to enable simple site search to work), but other than the product name, all details will be inserted via webyep.

The client’s current site is not an ecommerce site but they give a link on each page to submit an enquiry form. That form includes the name/part no. shown on that particular product page.

Questions are:

  1. How do I ‘attach’ and send this data with a single form instead of setting up a form and php script for every page?

  2. How do I add a link to the ‘contact us’ button shown

Website here: http://www.thinktankcd.com/Test/BDSTLtemp/trailer-supplies/product-groups/products/breakaway-cable.php

Thanks

Neil

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On Sep 26, 2011, at 8:30 AM, neil.west1 wrote:

I’m creating a replacement site for a client and pushing the boundaries of what I know in the process. It’s going to have 1,000ish products on it and I’m using a combination of FW and webyep.

Stop right there. WebYep is ideal for allowing the client to update a handful or two of pages, or to modify snippets within some or all pages (global footer/sidebar) but it is no substitute for a catalog application of this scope. You’re going to want to investigate shopping cart software or services, and use that to build your store – even if it’s not a store where you can buy things directly. This degree of product customization will become a maintenance nightmare for you and your client. I’m sure it’s technically possible to use WebYep for this, but you would be well out there on the bleeding edge with this many pages.

Each of the individual product pages will be created within FW (to enable simple site search to work), but other than the product name, all details will be inserted via webyep.

Simple Site Search will only index and find content that is static – typed into your page in Freeway. Anything you enter with WebYep will be invisible to it. A good catalog application/service will index and search all of the dynamic content in your store.

The client’s current site is not an ecommerce site but they give a link on each page to submit an enquiry form. That form includes the name/part no. shown on that particular product page.

Questions are:

  1. How do I ‘attach’ and send this data with a single form instead of setting up a form and php script for every page?

It’s pretty simple to pass a variable to a single form. For example, let’s say you have enquiry.php written to accept a querystring (GET) variable. You would write that form page just once, then each link to that page would look like this:

enquiry.php?product=123abc

Do that for each product in your catalog, and you’re all set. Inside enquiry.php, you would simply add a hidden form element named product, and set its value to the value of the $_GET['product'] attribute that PHP helpfully provides you. No matter what form handler you used, the ‘product’ variable would be passed along to it along with the rest of the form contents. If you want to pass multiple variables, just add them:

enquiry.php?product=123abc&color=blue&size=XXL
  1. How do I add a link to the ‘contact us’ button shown

What do you want this link to do?

Walter

Website here: http://www.thinktankcd.com/Test/BDSTLtemp/trailer-supplies/product-groups/products/breakaway-cable.php

Thanks

Neil

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  1. How do I add a link to the ‘contact us’ button shown

What do you want this link to do?

Link to a page as this existing one ProSolve

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On Sep 26, 2011, at 10:08 AM, neil.west1 wrote:

  1. How do I add a link to the ‘contact us’ button shown

What do you want this link to do?

Link to a page as this existing one ProSolve

I’m confused. Is this site your site, or somebody else’s? Because this is precisely what I was describing for your enquiry.php form. The URL contains a pair of variables:

  • cPath: 1_263
  • products_id: 1050

The contact page is interpreting these, and helpfully displays the result of a database lookup (the human-friendly product name) right there on the contact page so the visitor’s contact message has a meaningful context. This is precisely the sort of thing that is trivial to do with a relational database, and very very difficult to pull off using WebYep or another lightweight CMS.

Walter

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I’m confused. Is this site your site, or somebody else’s? Because this is precisely what I was describing for your enquiry.php form.
<

This is the site I’m regenerating and trying to functionally emulate but make better. It’s got all the behind-the-scenes stuff working right but looks terrible (IMO)

The following text is what I was typing when you posted again, but now you can see the existing ‘old’ site, you might be able to point me in the right direction and change what the following says:

I’m creating a replacement site for a client and pushing the boundaries of what I know in the process. It’s going to have 1,000ish products on it and I’m using a combination of FW and webyep.

Stop right there. WebYep is ideal for allowing the client to update a handful or two of pages, or to modify snippets within some or all pages (global footer/sidebar) but it is no substitute for a catalog application of this scope. You’re going to want to investigate shopping cart software or services, and use that to build your store – even if it’s not a store where you can buy things directly. This degree of product customization will become a maintenance nightmare for you and your client. I’m sure it’s technically possible to use WebYep for this, but you would be well out there on the bleeding edge with this many pages.

I know you are right about this, and in hindsight, I would have been better investigating this route, but I’m now in the position that I don’t know if I can change direction. The budget for creating the bare bones of the site has been exceeded (the client won’t be charged extra - it’s a learning experience for me!), so to purchase, learn and put together a new way of displaying and organising the products in a limited amount of time is a non-starter. I know this way will work to the extent that the client needs it to, even though there are better ways of doing it. In this case I just need to bite the bullet and complete the site, even it means coming back later to overhaul the whole thing with the ‘correct’ software at my expense.

Thank again Walter

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Hi Neil
Walter is quite right in saying this is on what I would call on the very edge of what webyep is designed to do… but it is possible, but not in the way you are describing.
The realities are that you want to construct the absolute minimum amount of pages within freeway and let webyep dynamically create the rest.
Then to make it searchable you wont be able to use the freeways site search because that only creates a catalogue of pages and content that freeway generates on the publish cycle so you would need to use something like a commercial search facility like this:

http://codecanyon.net/item/php-search-engine/89499

or like this:

http://www.wrensoft.com/

wrensoft is free up-to a point and the other is 8 dollars which is the cost of a couple of sandwiches. So I would classify that as virtually free. I have tested both and they both work with webyep although wrensoft you will need to create the catalogue via an application which is pc only but again that works in a pc emulator.

The last bit isn’t actually too tricky because I have done exactly the same thing, were by a form is sent but its contents are partly derived from a webyep element… I could try to dig it out and see how I did it.

So the long and short is yes it can be done but as walter has mentioned you may find other products that are more suited.

If you felt like you would still like to have a go then I would advocate creating a working model e.g. one that does job but where you haven’t spent a large amounts of time creating any graphics, this way you can test the real viability.

All the best Max

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7

Reposting with correct quotes!

I’m confused. Is this site your site, or somebody else’s? Because this is precisely what I was describing for your enquiry.php form.

This is the site I’m regenerating and trying to functionally emulate but make better. It’s got all the behind-the-scenes stuff working right but looks terrible (IMO)

The following text is what I was typing when you posted again, but now you can see the existing ‘old’ site, you might be able to point me in the right direction and change what the following says:

I’m creating a replacement site for a client and pushing the boundaries of what I know in the process. It’s going to have 1,000ish products on it and I’m using a combination of FW and webyep.

Stop right there. WebYep is ideal for allowing the client to update a handful or two of pages, or to modify snippets within some or all pages (global footer/sidebar) but it is no substitute for a catalog application of this scope. You’re going to want to investigate shopping cart software or services, and use that to build your store – even if it’s not a store where you can buy things directly. This degree of product customization will become a maintenance nightmare for you and your client. I’m sure it’s technically possible to use WebYep for this, but you would be well out there on the bleeding edge with this many pages.

I know you are right about this, and in hindsight, I would have been better investigating this route, but I’m now in the position that I don’t know if I can change direction. The budget for creating the bare bones of the site has been exceeded (the client won’t be charged extra - it’s a learning experience for me!), so to purchase, learn and put together a new way of displaying and organising the products in a limited amount of time is a non-starter. I know this way will work to the extent that the client needs it to, even though there are better ways of doing it. In this case I just need to bite the bullet and complete the site, even it means coming back later to overhaul the whole thing with the ‘correct’ software at my expense.

Thank again Walter

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wrensoft is free up-to a point and the other is 8 dollars which is the cost of a couple of sandwiches. So I would classify that as virtually free. I have tested both and they both work with webyep although wrensoft you will need to create the catalogue via an application which is pc only but again that works in a pc emulator.

The last bit isn’t actually too tricky because I have done exactly the same thing, were by a form is sent but its contents are partly derived from a webyep element… I could try to dig it out and see how I did it.

So the long and short is yes it can be done but as walter has mentioned you may find other products that are more suited.

Thanks Max, I had looked at Wren after reading about it in one of your previous posts, but the stumbling block is the PC. The PC environment on my machine (via Parallels)
is knackered - I’ve deleted something that I shouldn’t have and it all needs reinstalling by someone who knows what they’re doing with Windows i.e. not me! My Windows guy isn’t able to sort it in the near future and I need to get the site sorted sooner rather than later, which is why I was looking at the FW/webyep combo with all the pages created in FW but lesser content added in webyep so others that aren’t conversant with FW (employees/client) can add the details to existing ‘blank’ pages.

It needs saying at this point that the 1,000 products are split between 3 ‘sites’ which are all linked to the home page ‘site’, so I think the most pages in a single FW doc is going to be 500ish. Not ideal I know, but maybe the best I can do at the moment.

Neil

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9

On Sep 26, 2011, at 10:32 AM, neil.west1 wrote:

Reposting with correct quotes!

I’m confused. Is this site your site, or somebody else’s? Because this is precisely what I was describing for your enquiry.php form.

This is the site I’m regenerating and trying to functionally emulate but make better. It’s got all the behind-the-scenes stuff working right but looks terrible (IMO)

The following text is what I was typing when you posted again, but now you can see the existing ‘old’ site, you might be able to point me in the right direction and change what the following says:

I’m creating a replacement site for a client and pushing the boundaries of what I know in the process. It’s going to have 1,000ish products on it and I’m using a combination of FW and webyep.

Stop right there. WebYep is ideal for allowing the client to update a handful or two of pages, or to modify snippets within some or all pages (global footer/sidebar) but it is no substitute for a catalog application of this scope. You’re going to want to investigate shopping cart software or services, and use that to build your store – even if it’s not a store where you can buy things directly. This degree of product customization will become a maintenance nightmare for you and your client. I’m sure it’s technically possible to use WebYep for this, but you would be well out there on the bleeding edge with this many pages.

I know you are right about this, and in hindsight, I would have been better investigating this route, but I’m now in the position that I don’t know if I can change direction. The budget for creating the bare bones of the site has been exceeded (the client won’t be charged extra - it’s a learning experience for me!), so to purchase, learn and put together a new way of displaying and organising the products in a limited amount of time is a non-starter. I know this way will work to the extent that the client needs it to, even though there are better ways of doing it. In this case I just need to bite the bullet and complete the site, even it means coming back later to overhaul the whole thing with the ‘correct’ software at my expense.

If it were on my nickel (as it is yours) I would definitely invest quite a few hours in trying to do what Max says – make as few pages as possible – rather than slog through long-division exercises with hand-creating 1,000+ pages in Freeway. A properly-constructed site can get away with three or four template pages and a database of some sort (even WebYep is a database, it’s just not a relational database). Another thing I would definitely investigate is whether I could re-skin the existing application, since as you say, it is working as expected. Of the available options, that’s the one I would probably go down if I was trying to get out of it with as little investment as possible. The existing site (I deduce) is using a relational database and PHP templates. Depending on the skill level of the author, the look and feel may be abstracted out into separate template files, and altering those will update the entire look of the site without disturbing the workings. Of course, it could also be a horrible mess of “spaghetti code”, with the PHP and HTML interwoven so as to make editing a nightmare.

Walter

Thank again Walter

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10

Neil, I’m late to the conversation here but I would recommend looking at an open source e-commerce/donation ware solution like OpenCart - http://www.opencart.com/

It it very easy to customize the look and feel of your site (one css file) there are a number of plugins and mods that can support things like “request more info” etc. It has a very easy admin area where your client can add new products or make changes to prices, stock levels etc.

If you are already upside down on this project then it’s better to bite the bullet, uphold your reputation and deliver the best possible end product to your client. Instead of hacking your way through FW and WY just use Opencart it has been designed to handle thousands of products.

My 2 cents,
Marcel

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11

On 26 Sep 2011, 3:09 pm, Helveticus wrote:

Neil, I’m late to the conversation here but I would recommend looking at an open source e-commerce/donation ware solution like OpenCart - http://www.opencart.com/

It it very easy to customize the look and feel of your site (one css file) there are a number of plugins and mods that can support things like “request more info” etc. It has a very easy admin area where your client can add new products or make changes to prices, stock levels etc.

If you are already upside down on this project then it’s better to bite the bullet, uphold your reputation and deliver the best possible end product to your client. Instead of hacking your way through FW and WY just use Opencart it has been designed to handle thousands of products.

My 2 cents,
Marcel

Thanks for the input Marcel, I’ve just been looking at the website and have downloaded Opencart. I’m currently trying to find out if our ISP, 1&1, can support it. One question though, the website says you need a mysql database, how do I go about creating one of those?

Thanks

Neil

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12

On Sep 26, 2011, at 11:43 AM, neil.west1 wrote:

On 26 Sep 2011, 3:09 pm, Helveticus wrote:

Neil, I’m late to the conversation here but I would recommend looking at an open source e-commerce/donation ware solution like OpenCart - http://www.opencart.com/

It it very easy to customize the look and feel of your site (one css file) there are a number of plugins and mods that can support things like “request more info” etc. It has a very easy admin area where your client can add new products or make changes to prices, stock levels etc.

If you are already upside down on this project then it’s better to bite the bullet, uphold your reputation and deliver the best possible end product to your client. Instead of hacking your way through FW and WY just use Opencart it has been designed to handle thousands of products.

My 2 cents,
Marcel

Thanks for the input Marcel, I’ve just been looking at the website and have downloaded Opencart. I’m currently trying to find out if our ISP, 1&1, can support it. One question though, the website says you need a mysql database, how do I go about creating one of those?

Your hosting provider will probably offer something like cPanel, where you configure your account details. Look there for anything related to databases, and in particular, look for a link to phpMyAdmin, which is the most popular server-side database admin tool.

Walter

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13

At 08:30 -0400 26/9/11, neil.west1 wrote:

I’m creating a replacement site for a client and pushing the
boundaries of what I know in the process. It’s going to have
1,000ish products on it and I’m using a combination of FW and
webyep. Each of the individual product pages will be created within
FW (to enable simple site search to work), but other than the
product name, all details will be inserted via webyep.
The client’s current site is not an ecommerce site but they give a
link on each page to submit an enquiry form. That form includes the
name/part no. shown on that particular product page.

Website here:
http://www.thinktankcd.com/Test/BDSTLtemp/trailer-supplies/product-groups/products/breakaway-cable.php

I have been putting off mentioning my site in the main forum “until
I’ve got that next bit sorted”, but there are similarities with your
site so I’ll mention it anyway. It is live and producing sales. It
will have purchase capability as soon as I can get it there
(questions on the dynamo list in the offing :slight_smile: ).

It’s http://kirkhouse.co.uk/

There were around 1400 products before I went on holiday last month.
There are now more. If each combination of options were classed as a
different product, there’d be millions.

The main catalogue part is just three FW pages - Home, Range, and
Product. The data is all plugged in with embedded PHP from a MySql
database. The database ‘design’ is hampered by being descended from a
FileMaker database that was designed, loaded, and used on the fly as
needs arrived, by someone with no technical background at all.
Starting with known requirements and known products as you have would
produce a much better solution than mine.

On the main product page there is a div defined in FW that is filled
by an included PHP script. That div is refreshed with Ajax as options
are selected. There is also a FW page that has the PHP Make Insert
Page action applied that is inserted as a hidden div into the Product
page. This supplies the swatch panel. The contents of this are also
loaded using PHP and updated as needed using JavaScript.

The chances of there being something already out there that would fit
my needs is very small. Discovering and customising it if it does
exist, along with the time wasted on solutions that almost work would
take longer than it took me to produce what I have - and I wouldn’t
understand it as well. I suspect the same will apply to you.

David

–
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
email@hidden
www.ivdcs.co.uk

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14

I’ve done a few smaller WebYep sites incorporating Mal’s as the payment processor. I tend to only recommend it for up to 100 products max. and in cases where you need to gather sales and other data with a sale. Beyond that you might as well use a dedicated shopping cart and spend the time styling the CSS that rather than wrestle WepYep and a smattering of php to make it all work.

As for OpenCart use a PRO account @ ineedwebhosting.co.uk to auto install OpenCart script and the database in one go. Your only job is to set information and style it

David

On 26 Sep 2011, at 16:43, “neil.west1” email@hidden wrote:

Thanks for the input Marcel, I’ve just been looking at the website and have downloaded Opencart. I’m currently trying to find out if our ISP, 1&1, can support it. One question though, the website says you need a mysql database, how do I go about creating one of those?

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15

Wow, this is getting daunting!

To explain, I’m an illustrator and graphic designer who, over recent years, has gotten into the web side of things using FW. I can just about get my head around webyep, Opencart looks ‘reasonably’ straight-forward, but MYSQL… that’s a different proposition altogether - I can’t even get phpmyadmin to install! I’m beginning to think that I’ve gone down a route that I really shouldn’t have, but at the same time, that I really need to!

I have to look at alternatives, and the only one I can think of is to get someone else to set up the bare bones so I can understand how it’s done, populate the site and get the client where he needs to be.

If anyone is interested in helping out with this side of things, please email me with an idea of cost and a phone number so I can ring you back.

Thanks for everybodys advice so far.

Neil

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16

Hi neil
I cant find your email address but if you contact me directly then I can see what I can do

all the best max

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