change

Shopping Cart

This file documents significant changes made to the MyCart distribution
since the original.

For installation, setup, legal and support information, please refer to
the README file.

CHANGES FOR VERSION 1999.10.27
This is the firest major revision of the MyCart scripts.  As a result, the
changes are many.  I may have forgotten a few, but most of them are as
follows:

- Removed the dependance on cookies.  90% of the problems people reported
with the original distribution were with cookies, so I removed them.  The
resulting URLs aren't as pretty, but the alternative was to lose
functionality.  After examining popular sites that make use of shopping
carts (i.e. amazon.com), I figured that people probably don't make a big
fuss over good looking URLs.
- Order numbers are not generated until after the shopper has checked out
and provided payment information.  This should eliminate gaps in order
numbers.
- The items in the CartItems and Users tables now expire
automatically after they become more than a day old.  This will eliminate
the resulting huge tables when people fail to use the "Flush Data"
functions from the previous version.  These tables should only contain
current "shopping" users and items that people have in their carts.  If
they still exist on the site after 24 hours, then it's pretty safe to
assume that they have abandoned their cart.
- The items in the Buyers, Receipts and Orders tables expire automatically
after one year.  One year seemed sufficient for keeping electronic copies
of user information and receipts. If you want to increase the number of
years, you can do so by modifying the index.php file in the admin
directory.  View the README file for more information.
- Added support to supply database names dynamically.  This should ease
the stress of needed modifications when more than one shopping cart is
needed on one database server.
- Auto forward customers after they have placed their order so that
multiple orders are not created when a customer refreshes the receipt
screen.
- Create and show a URL on the receipt that customers can visit if they
wish to review their receipt at a later date.
- Support for easily changing the defualt root directory for the shopping
cart scripts.
- Categories are stored and accessed as ID numbers instead of names.  This
eliminates the strange behaviors associated with URLs that are made of
special characters - especially quotation marks.
- The ability to specify a text string (such as "Shipping Extra") to show
when the shipping amount has not been specified.
- The ability to change pictures shown for an item without running the
modifyItem script.
- Warning screen before deleting categories or items.
- All pages the customers see check for the existence of a valid, current
UserID, and assigns one of they do not have one.  This should eliminate
people bookmarking pages and coming in with previous user's shopping cart
items.  This will also assign a UserID to people that come directly to
your site starting somewhere other than the home page.
- The viewCart script checks for an empty cart and reports "Your Cart
Contains No Items" when true instead of stating "You Shopping Cart
Contains the Following Items" and displaying an empty table.
- Once an order is complete, that customer's information is immediately
and automatically removed from the CartItems and Users tables to help 
avoid table congestion.
- When a category is deleted, all of the items in that category and any
pictures related to those items are automatically removed.
- Whenever an item is deleted, it's picture is removed also.
- The Year drop-down list on the searchReceipts box is generated
dynamically, starting from the current year and working five years 
backward, rather than being hard coded in standard HTML.  This will
help avoid modification of this script in coming years.
- If there is no description provided for a particular item, customers
will not see "Description:" near the bottom of the description view of the
item.
- Fixed a typo on the description script.
- Added the item description to the page that lists all items in the
selected category.
- Strip all non-numeric values (like dollar signs and commas) out of item
addition and change response forms to eliminate user error as a cause of
database data flaws.
- Changed all file names to end in .php for future compatibility with
"standard" PHP4 naming conventions.

This file, these scripts and "MyCart" are
Copyright 1998-1999, Rosenet Internet Services