Jaxx

First, change the form method back to post. Next, assuming the two code snippets you've shared is the only code, you're missing the assignment of $userName from the $_POST variable. It's not an automatic assignment. In the php block in your original code you need a statement like >$userName = $_POST['userName']; before $userName will be defined. Cheers, Chris

Ah. I stand corrected. -Chris

Hi Robert, First off, I'd look at what kind of site your friend is building. Is it primarily a storefront where she's selling lots of products? Or does she have a small number of services or products (or even a single product)? Does she plan on having a newsletter, and how large of a list does she intend to build? Getting a starter plan is a good choice, especially since TCH allows you to upgrade/downgrade your plan as needed. Since you mentioned transferring her to TCH, I assume that means she has a site already in existence. I'd go with Rob's recommendation of getting the host first and testing before moving the nameservers. About shopping carts. I've used OSC and think it's great. There's lots of support and extensions, and packages like Zen that package a lot of the most popular extensions, making it easier to set up your cart. I recommend that you be pretty comfortable with HTML and PHP if you decide to play with OSC. It's fun to tinker with, but can get a little hairy for beginners based on the feedback I've seen on the forums. That being said, if she's only got a handful of products, or don't want to be bothered, you might consider a different solution such as 1shoppingcart.com. The benefits to using a cart service is that it can be easier and faster to set up, their order forms usually are already secure so you don't need your own SSL for order support, and there are additional useful bells and whistles such as ad tracking support, autoresponders, newsletter/email broadcasting, and other niceties beyond just a cart system. Of course, there's a monthly fee involved (1shoppingcart starts at $29 for their basic cart). The downside is that you don't get as much customization as you could with a solution like OSC. As far as SSL vs. shared SSL goes, if you're using a service they will usually have their own SSL server to do transactions on, and there's not a need to have your own in most cases. If you use a solution like OSC, then I'd recommend getting your own cert since they're not that expensive. If you really have a shoestring then I suppose you can always use cloaking with a frameset to mask the shared cert address. I played with it once and it seemed to work ok. One thing to keep in mind is newsletters and broadcast email. If your friend is planning on building a large email list I do recommend using a service. Most ISPs and Web Hosts place limits on the amount of mail traffic that goes through their servers to control traffic and spam, among other things. Services like 1SC (which also feature a great autoresponder service) specialize in high volume mail. If she's planning on building a big list then having this type of service is a must. About Merchant accounts. From his response Rob sounds like he like 2CheckOut, which is who TCH uses. Technically they're not a merchant account provider, which is why they're easier to get set up and are a bit more flexible in some ways than a typical merchant account. Plus, they have no monthly fees and have a low setup fee. The major downside is that you don't have a virtual terminal and can't take phone/fax orders, and they don't support recurring transactions from certain shopping cart services like 1shoppingcart. For a regular merchant account, you can find reputable places that don't charge setup fees and still have reasonable monthly rates. One place I've found with good reviews is charge.com. Hope this helps, Chris

From a purely business standpoint, regardless of whatever business you're in, you should never go with a sole proprietorship precisely because of the personal liability issues. At the least, form a LLC or to be the most protected, form a C-Corp (regular corporation). I'd also avoid S-Corps. I recommend that you do have all the proper disclaimers and terms of use in place, but don't rely solely on them to cover your assets. I don't have a reseller account, but I do own a couple of businesses and am incorporated. I'm not an attorney or accountant, but just giving some thoughts based on my own studies, experience, and counsel. I also suggest that you do some reading on the topic and check with an accountant and/or attorney. HTH

I knew there was a reason I loved this joint. I've been recommending TCH to everyone and am getting another new client signed on now. I originally thought to have one of my other sites at a different host to be "diversified," but what's the point when everybody here rocks! -C

I have to admit, I really liked asp when I first started coding with it. Granted, it was a bit cluttered up sometimes, but still pretty cool. I think a big factor was how similar it is to coding VB, so my experience with VB certainly helped that. MS hosts, however, can get pretty expensive, especially when you look at linux based hosts like TCH where you can spend as much in a YEAR for an equivalent monthly cost of a MS host. So I let go of asp and figured I'd find something else friendlier to code in. I almost went with perl before I found php.I have to agree with btrfld, having worked with C++ awhile, it was even more comfortable than asp and VB was. I'm definitely a php convert. Better than Cats.

Thanks for the compliment Jack. Thanks also for posting the "Ultimate Form Mail". It's saved me a lot of time coding the backend.

Renaming $page did the trick. So apparently there was indeed a conflict there. That also explains why the other script worked, since I use different _GET values in that one (I also took borfast's advice and changed _REQUEST to _GET - thanks). I also had to rename a couple other variables that had the same problem. But it's working great now. Woohoo! My first content management system! Thanks a lot for all the help you guys. It's greatly appreciated. If you want to see the first pass result, go to www.soulfulhealing.com. After I've tweaked it a bit more I'll post it for critique. Regards, Chris

Thanks for the responses guys. I appreciate the feedback. I had wondered whether objects and array variables could be defined on the fly. It's my understanding that they can, based on other php sources I've seen. $page isn't necessarily a real object - it's more like an array that's retyped using object syntax. Part of the problem with defining $page ahead of time is its dynamic nature. My code is set up to use an html template whose sections are stored in a table. Content for each section is kept in a different table and is loaded into a variable based on the section name. Content is loaded into the section variable in the manner of >$page->{$section->name} = <entry information>; Because the section element of $page is created on the fly I don't see a simple way of declaring it beforehand. The code works well on the test server, but it broke once I uploaded it here.

I built a basic content management system in php using mysql. I have it up and running fine on a local test server, using php 4.3.3 and the current build of mysql. When I tried to post it to my TCH account, I'm getting some odd results. Here is the first section of the code: >echo("The request var for page is {$_REQUEST['page']}<br>"); //debugging code // Checks to see whether the requested page exists and sets a default page if it doesn't. if ( isset($_REQUEST['page']) ) { $page->name = $_REQUEST['page']; echo("Requested page is $page->name"); // debugging code if (!entry_exists('pagedata','name',$page->name)) { $page->name = "404"; // File Not Found Error Page } } else { $page->name = "home"; } The _REQUEST var is set properly. But $page->name (as well as any other variables that use object syntax) is null, which naturally breaks the rest of the code. The thing that makes this perplexing is that I have a completely different script that opens the exact same way, and it appears to be functioning properly. I even wrote a basic test script that just assigns and echoes $page->name and it works fine. All the code runs happily on my test server. I've tried re-ftp'ing the files to the host numerous times. I even tried to upload the content to another host as a test with the same results. So I'm pretty stumped as to what the problem could be, and why it works in one script but won't in another. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Cheers, Chris

I happened upon Sitepoint through the TCH resource page. I hadn't really thought about PHP until I read the first four chapters available from Sitepoint's "Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL" (http://www.sitepoint.com/books/phpmysql1/). Up til then I had been thinking about learning Perl to write dynamic code. After looking at those chapters I was hooked on php, so I set up a test server with php 4.3.3 and MySQL and built a simple content management system. I used a lot of the site resources that Jack and others mentioned earlier to get me started, and downloaded the pdf version of the php manual from php.net. I haven't gotten anything in hardcopy yet. It also didn't hurt that I have a background in VB, Pascal, and C/C++, so coding is nothing new to me. I learn best through examining code and testing things out, so after looking at all kinds of code examples it didn't take long to get my site up and running - on my test server, anyway. I'm still having issues getting it to work right on here, though. Cheers, Chris