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Re: [mv] Seeking Help
At 09:39 AM 10/15/1999 , you wrote:
>****** message to minivend-users from 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.
That's insane. If he doesn't want Minivend to dynamically create the
page, you *can* place a static file for a product in the minivend/pages
dir. He can even use his HTML-for-idiots.exe
I can't really think of any reason why anyone would want to use MV just
for the "shopping cart" (that's pretty ambiguous) and order processing.
>
>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.
If these product pages were really static (not served by Minivend) you
will most likely run into problems with tracking the cart. If a user had
cookies disabled it simply would cease to work.
>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.
Hmm, this is true - take a look at the mailing list archives or search the
docs from minivend.com
>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.
Well, if the pages are static, served only by the web server, your reports
would be the web server's log files. Any information that Minivend
collects would be in the minivend_install_root / your_catalog / etc /
>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.
Sounds to me like your boss is abusing Minivend.... like buying a BMW and
then hiring someone to lead the mule pulling it.
>
>Thank you for your time.
>
>Alex
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