Forum Moderators: travelin cat
I'm a somewhat accomplished html designer with javascript orderform experience. I am versed in Excel an Filemaker data transferring and can establish the data structure in the appropriate manner to dump into OSCommerce. I'd like to manage the product listings in the database and want a relatively automatic procedure to make product line updates to OSCommerce (similar to another topic in this forum).
I need clarification about whether I can load and develop OSCommerce on my workstation. I use OS9 Macs and a PC. Open to suggestions for best OSCommerce Reference materials, online or purchase.
I don't know if you can actually run php scripts on an OS9 desktop machine... it would be interesting if you could though. Maybe someone else knows?
I'm really curious to your experiences with phpMyAdmin. Do I understand correctly this allows datafields to upload to the store in batches.
I will be looking into this with great interest but my attention to the forum may be sporadic. I have other work going on that's demanding my first attention. Thank you.
afaik, you can't. There are sql clients for os9 but no php support. phpadmin and bbedit is the setup of choice in this case, i'd say.
Another way would be to write your own tool using p.e. 4th dimension [4d.com]. 4d is fairly easy to understand allthough you should have some skills with it ... sql support and even soap is included into the recent version (4d 2003) ...
Allthough it's probably not what you wanted to hear, i'd suggest switching from fm to 4d and take advantage of the features (more to come) of 4d in regards of sql, soap and the direct communication with webstar [webstar.com] servers / php.
This sounds familiar to some good-sounding advice by a non-mac collegue of mine.
1) Build and maintain all the product listings in a master database. He suggests MS Access but FM or 4D may be the choice. Everything in this master database: product numbers, descriptions, our costs, notes, image filenames, etc.
2) A briefer version would be output for serving the data to the static html pages for the web. This briefer version would also populate the mysq (or sql) and phpamdmin scripts I suppose.
It would be highly appreciated if someone would please briefly describe the phpadmim scripts and how they work.
Also any further primer regarding the 4D sql/soap/webstar servers if possible. Thank you for your responses. ..this forum is great.
glad you like my suggestion regarding 4d.
For me, one of the most important things with 4d is that you don't need any active pages (php etc.), you don't need no phpadmin or sql interface to maintain a complex 4d server (even a cluster is fairly easy done). 4d is all in one. It's a static web server as well as a fully dynamic database web server. It's a complex relational database development tool - client / server. It takes less than minutes to set up a small online database. You can even develop online if you don't compile your db structure.
And if you're bored you can even do complex sql queries or communicate with a additional oracle backend. All built in and available to you. ;)
Don't want to promo 4d here, but you should definitely check out their website and their quick guides to 4d. I run about 10 different self coded databases (some with more than 10 gigs of data) in intranet and internet. If you know a little bit about it and use a good hardware, 4d is very powerfull, fast and solid.
What I've been doing when I needed to make a large change to one of my tables' contents was export it as a CSV file through phpmyadmin. Then I open it with FileMaker, make the changes and export it back to CSV format. Then I go back to phpmyadmin and upload the new data. It's been working very well...
