Jesse L. Palmer

The GreenTech Shop database is completed

I have finished creating the new The GreenTech Shop database. I created it in MySQL and I used PHPMyAdmin as my front-end. The above screen shot is the table structure on one of my tables. This new database will replace most of my current need for the out-of-the-box Yahoo! Store (or Yahoo! Merchant Solutions if you want to be fancy) database that I use. Using a custom database should improve my site in the following ways:

• Allows me to store data that the Yahoo! Store database wouldn’t, such as, Green Labels my products may use and my product’s Green Properities.
• Allows me to use PHP with a Yahoo! Store. I’ve been using the Yahoo! Store coding tags and templates for my current site and I think that this is very time consuming. I think it would be easier to create own template using PHP.

My next step is to go ahead and redesign my the template that I mentioned above. The orginal plan was to create the database, then create a control panel that would access that data. Now I think it may be better to go ahead with the redesign and I can wait on the custom control panel. For the time being the PHPMyAdmin interface should be an adequate front-end to manage data.

Upgrading The GreenTech Shop Database

I’m in the process of upgrading The GreenTech Shop database. Currently, The GreenTech Shop has been using a Yahoo! E-Commerce back-end (I’m not sure what RDBMS they use), but I just don’t think that its flexible enough for to create a dynamic site that I envision.

For example, I want the radios section page to show all of the radios we have for sale in our database dynamically. So I’m going to have to write a simple query to select all radios where the product category equals radio. Simple enough right? The problem is that you can’t access the Yahoo! E-Commerce back-end using SQL as far as I know. So I’m in the process of creating my own database which I can access using PHP. This will make the website more dynamic and I can start deleting all of those static pages that are pretty tedious to maintain.

I believe that you can do something like this using Yahoo’s templates, but I’m not interested in learning their system. For whatever reason, probably prior experience, I still think that Yahoo’s template will be flexible enough. At this point I rather build my own custom solution.