Seeking Help

[Alex Darke <darke@powersites.net>]

I'd like to start off this post by saying right off the top, that after I heard what it was that my boss wanted, I told him from the start that it would be better to write our own shopping cart than do this the way he wants, but in the end, the boss is the boss, and as long as he writes my paychecks, he gets the things he wants.

Which is why I am writing. :o)

I'm fairly new to minivend, and my boss is looking to use minivend for online purchasing. The problem being, he doesn't want to *use* minivend. He just wants the shopping cart, mailed orders via PGP and/or credit card purchases. The scenario is this.

He wants to build static pages outside of minivend, within an HTML authoring tool, and then have, next to the images of the products and their descriptions, a "Buy it!" button that when they click on it, takes them into their shopping cart, takes their info, and processes the order. It seemed simple enough at first as I dove into minivend, I simply used MiniMate to add the products into the back end database for minivend to have access to, and then used the url (this is an example)

http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/store/order?;ID001;1

And it would bring us into the cart with the info from the database, etc.

I'm still now sure how I configure the actual shopping cart page (for example, if we specify that a product has colors or differing sizes, how do I add those things to the cart, doing things as described above?), given that I am not configuring minivend as the store at all. Just using, as I said, the backend flatfile DBs, the shopping cart, and order completion.

I seem to recall at one time stumbling across some documentation that made it clear that I could define things to bring into the shopping cart via <form> and <input type hidden> fields in regular HTML, but for the life of me, I can not find that information anywhere again, and am unsure of where it is located.

The last bit of the puzzle is the reports. If we're not using minivend as the actual store itself, just for the closing bits of it, are we losing some aspects of reports that I am not aware of given my newness to the product? I can't seem to FIND the reports at this precise moment, let alone judge if we are losing something doing things this way.

I'm not expecting anyone to have the complete answers to my questions :o) I do do my own work. Its just that I had this project thrown on my plate pretty close to it's deadline to be finished, and if anyone has some pointers, urls, or other info that might be of use for someone doing the above, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you. Any help is both appreciated and welcome.

Thank you for your time.

Alex