Making the code from the book 'Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce From Novice to Professional - 2nd edition' published in 2008 run in 2021

In this step by step article you'll see how a few adjustments to the original code that goes with the venerable book by Cristian Darie and Emilian Balanescu, published in 2008 will bring the shop to life with a much newer version of PHP and MySQL (tested with PHP 7.3 and MariaDB 10.1).

This book is one of my favorite PHP texts on the topic of e-commerce, focused only on the single project with its 700+ pages, it shows how to build a fully featured online shop, and along the way educates how to separate the logic into three-tier architecture:

data
business
presentation

Here is a list of features covered and implemented in the book that I've found especially useful and interesting:

being able tot add options (attributes) to a product
selectively displaying featured products on the home, and department pages
showing product recommendations
searching the catalog
being able to store a product in more than one category
the order managment system (order pipeline) to keep track of orders at every stage in the process, from stock checking to shipping and customer notification
adding items to the shopping cart with ajax using straight and compact javascript code, in case javascript is disabled in the client there is non-ajax 'add to cart' functionality

I find the layout of the store minimalistic and cute. The CSS files are quite small and everything loads quickly without the overhead involved with modern frameworks.

Editing departments - a screenshot of tshirtshop demo website for a book 'Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce From Novice to Professional'

Editing a product - a screenshot of tshirtshop demo website for a book 'Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce From Novice to Professional'

Editing products for a category - a screenshot of tshirtshop demo website for a book 'Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce From Novice to Professional'

Storefront - a single product page - a screenshot of tshirtshop demo website for a book 'Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce From Novice to Professional'

Surprisingly, the administrative area looks great even on a small mobile device when handled horizontally, though there is too little gap between some controlling elements that could be adjusted to facilitate better usability. To make the store front look great on mobile devices as well, some media queries and style tweaking is necessary. Actually I've found it's easier to rewrite the HTML and CSS responsible for the columns, making them adaptable to a great range of screen sizes, than tweaking the old styles.

I've chosen the code belonging to the Chapter 11 that concludes the Phase 1: Getting a Site Up as a base to work on here, and set up the live demonstration for it.

Look at the live demonstration

Update on 2024

The live demonstration was running fine on PHP 7+ when I wrote this article in 2021, now the server of this website runs PHP 8+, which is not compatible with the previous version of Smarty that I used for this project. I tried to update Smarty to the newest version, but got deprecation warnings about using the setPluginsDir() method. Unfortunately I could not find any information on what new method should be used instead.

So to have fun playing with the tshirtshop without delving into a plethora of technical issues use PHP 7+.

Preparation

First things first, to be on the same page, make sure that your working directory that contains the shop's files is named tshirtshop (rename it if necessary), and located inside the htdocs directory. Don't move away from this directory during the process because the shell commands that follow will be relative to it.

The fresh tshirtshop directory from the book's downloaded material for Chapter 11 must contain the following items:

directories:
============
	business
	images
	include
	presentation
	product_images
	styles

files:
======
	.htaccess
	404.php
	500.php
	admin.php
	index.php

The url ln the browser's location bar should be:

http://localhost/tshirtshop/

Now let's take actions that will make the code work

Create the libs directory and add the smarty package to it.

You might use the same package I've downloaded and installed on my system in 2020 from the official website. Download

If so, move the downloaded file to the project directory:

$ mv -v [your-download-dir]/smarty.tgz .

Uncompress it:

$ tar zxfv smarty.tgz

the tar command will place the uncompressed smarty directory into the libs automatically!

Remove the downloaded archive file that we no longer need:

$ rm -v smarty.tgz

If instead of using my copy of smarty, you downloaded the package from the official website, uncompress the file and place it in a way that the smarty directory will be located in the libs directory.

In the index.php file find the following line:

$application = new Application();

and replace it with the this code snippet:

$application = new Smarty();
$application->setTemplateDir(TEMPLATE_DIR);
$application->setCompileDir(COMPILE_DIR);
$application->setConfigDir(CONFIG_DIR);
$application->setPluginsDir(array(
	SMARTY_DIR       . 'plugins',
	PRESENTATION_DIR . 'smarty_plugins'
));

Repeat this step for the admin.php file as well.

Refresh the page, if you see an error message saying something similar to:

ERRNO: 2
TEXT: mkdir(): Permission denied
LOCATION: /htdocs/tshirtshop/libs/smarty/sysplugins/smarty_internal_runtime_writefile.php,
line 45, at January 27, 2021, 9:23 pm
...

change the permissions of the presentation directory:

$ chmod 777 presentation

Now you'll probably see the following error:

Access denied for user 'tshirtshopadmin'@'localhost' (using password: YES)...

Open the include/config.php file, and adjust the values of the constants related to the database connection, if you use the XAMPP or LAMPP stack, you'd need to change them to these:

define('DB_SERVER', 'localhost');
define('DB_USERNAME', 'root');
define('DB_PASSWORD', '');

Download the complete database for the chapter 11 that I exported from a working tshirtshop demo site, and import it into your mariaDB/mysql server.

If you use XAMPP or LAMPP and had a problem with creating stored procedures during the import, you can fix it by executing the following line in your shell:

$ sudo /opt/lampp/bin/mysql_upgrade -u root -p

You might need to adjust the path to mysql_upgrade package for your particular installation. or just run it like this:

That's all there is to it!

Now enoy playing with your shop!

To see the administrative area, open this url:
http://localhost/tshirtshop/admin.php

the default username and password are:

tshirtshopadmin
tshirtshopadmin

they set as constants in the include/config.php file.

If you still have an issue running the tshirtshop project, please use the the comments below to describe the issue.

Making the code from the book 'Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce From Novice to Professional - 2nd edition' published in 2008 run in 2021

This page was last updated on October 11, 2024