There are three main aspects to building an e-commerce website: setting up a shopping cart, hooking into a payment processing system, and wiring all that into your online store pages. The complexities involved with creating a shopping cart are effectively solved for you with the service at Mal's E-Commerce site. This also makes working with a payment processing system an absolute doddle, from PayPal and NoChex through to e-Gold and other heavyweight credit card processors. This leaves you with the fiddly process of weaving all the myriad code options into your own 'shop floor' web pages.
Normally this would be a daunting process for all but the most dedicated site programmers, but the Mal's E-Commerce Suite set of Freeway plug-in 'Actions' turns this on its head. Its point-and-click interface means that, once you have signed up for a free Mal's E-Commerce account, you will be able to turn a web page into a live, working store in less than a minute, and without touching a single bit of code.
In this Masterclass, we will show you exactly how to do this, and we will also demonstrate how to add a high level of hacker-blocking security to your store pages. We will also show how to customise the shopping cart to fit your site design by adding a couple of URLs for your graphics, which is the closest you will have to come to programming.
You'll need a copy of Freeway Pro from www.softpress.com to go through this Masterclass. We assume a basic knowledge of how to use it, but simple DTP experience is fine. You'll also need the $40 Mal's E-Commerce Suite from www.freewayactions.com, and some web space for storing your pages.
Code accessFreeway is often seen as just an appearance-oriented layout tool, but it is very good at handling custom code as well. If you need to add or alter the code for your layouts, there are a few methods.
In the Page menu, HTML Markup inserts additional code at key points in the page structure. From the Item menu, Markup Items can be placed anywhere in the page, and the code they contain is merged with the rest when the page is published. Extending attributes for specific elements is done with the Extended dialog - select an item, choose Extended from the appropriate menu, then add the name/value attributes.
Then there is the URL object option. Draw an HTML box on the page and then set it to be a URL object instead. This can link to external images or code, and is a simple way to build SSI (server-side includes) for content merging at the server end.
Oh, and there is Freeway's own 'local include' trick. Link an HTML box to a text file and the contents will be combined with the page when published.
Finally, there are Actions. At one end of the scale, Actions can deal with in-page graphics manipulation such as ramped image transparency, RGB channel editing, sharpening and blurring. At the other, they can customise code to extreme levels, from rewriting style sheets to merging content in the page with data from FileMaker databases.
Basically, you do not have to touch raw code if you do not want to. Instead, you select items, set parameters, and then leave them to get on with it. However, the Source Code Snooper Action, from www.softpress.com/actions, allows full access if you want it.
Simply secureIn step 11, the hash key code is used by the Action to produce a unique checksum for each link. This is included with the buy links, and the server compares the checksum in a request against the hash key. Since only the server and the site owner know the hash code, these links cannot be tampered with. Without the Action, you would have to calculate the checksum manually for every link.
Author: Keith Martin
Making an e-commerce site with Freeway