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Page 1 of 2 My last article about integrating Cartweaver with your web site focused on our JumpStarts. The article described how to integrate Cartweaver with the Minneapolis Jumpstart, which was an e-commerce JumpStart, but the techniques could apply to any of our JumpStarts. This article will focus on integrating Cartweaver with any design, including the simple layouts included with the latest versions of Dreamweaver (CS3 and CS4).
More information on JumpStarts can be found in this article by Sheri German, and information on using Dreamweaver page designs can be found in this article by Stephanie Sullivan. Cartweaver can be found at the Cartweaver site and is available for ColdFusion, ASP, and PHP. I wrote the PHP version of the software. This tutorial will use the PHP version but will be equally applicable to all versions.
For the purposes of this tutorial, I will not cover basic Cartweaver installation, as that is best left to the Cartweaver manual. I'll assume you either have Cartweaver installed, or simply want to see how it integrates with your design or any other design.
Cartweaver is designed as an e-commerce system with an administrative interface for maintaining a product catalog, a shopping cart to maintain a user's list of products, and a transaction processor to pass transactions off to a dedicated gateway or payment processor. It is designed for both hand-coders and for Dreamweaver users. Because it is designed as a system of include files it integrates easily with JumpStarts and other page templates, Dreamweaver page layouts, and custom-designed layouts of your own design.
Cartweaver includes files can be added in several ways:
Using the Cartweaver toolbar:
Figure 1: Toolbar
Using the Cartweaver menu on the main menu bar:
Figure 2: Menu items
Or by using the Snippet panel:
Figure 3: Snippets
Generally, if you are setting up Cartweaver for the first time, you might want to allow the Cartweaver setup server behavior to create all the default files for you so that you can see the cart in action before adding your design. However, for this tutorial, I'm going to create the files one by one using a Dreamweaver layout. The Cartweaver Setup server behavior looks like this:
Figure 4: Cartweaver Setup server behavior
You should fill in the values to make the database connections, and then switch to the Presentation page of the server behavior:
Figure 5: Setting up the presentation files
If you uncheck the presentation page boxes, no presentation pages will be created, however, your filenames should be defined here. This ensures that Cartweaver knows which file does what in the site. The default filenames are fine for this sample site (index, results, details, showcart, orderform, and confirmation, each using the file extension of your chosen server model -- .asp, .cfm, or .php). After pressing OK, the application.php (or .asp or .cfm) file will contain the page names and other parameters needed by the application. Now we'll begin creating pages for the site.
Keywords
cartweaver,cs3,cs4,page layout,page design,template,jumpstart,php,asp,coldfusion,cf,cfm,e-commerce,ecommerce,e-store,estore
