Shopping Cart. HTML Code.?

Question

Hi there,

I have my own html code for a shopping cart for my website. I am using dreamweaver as my website editor. Now i was just wondering do i really need to post the html code for my shopping cart on EACH OF MY ITEM? Is there another way of just pasting the code on just one catalog and the other catalog page will be updated? I just want to make sure that what i am doing is normal bec. I have hundreds of item on my website and i want to try doing it the right way and not waste time. Also I have 13 web pages on my website. and each time i need to add something on my homepage i need to do the same thing one by one on my other pages. Do you know if there's a way like setting up a template for common page and each time i change something on that template it will update the rest of the page? Please let me know.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I would go ahead and use an open-source shopping cart system, and focus on skinning it to fit your site, rather than making hundreds of product pages.

One great system is OS Commerce:

http://www.oscommerce.com

Answer 2

Based upon what you just described, here are my suggestions.

1) I would say that you can create a RSS-feed type of thing that has the layout of your page. And then you would use some kind of server-side technology (i.e. ColdFusion, ASP .NET, PHP, ...etc.) to read in this RSS-feed to display the page dynamically.

2) The other way is to keep the name of your pages the same across different sites. When you are done with the changes in one of your sites, you just FTP this page to all of your servers.

I am a web developer by trade and I have done it for the past 9 years. If you have any additional questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Answer 3

You could use server side includes (shtml) for your items then make one file for each item and an include statement on the pages you needed to show them on. The same can be done with xhtml which is newer.

It really is much easier with PHP or ASP active codes. As you add more items you will begin to have management issues.