Lynda.com has just released my latest training course Building an Ecommerce Web Site Using Dreamweaver with PHP. This course focuses on two approaches to implementing eCommerce functionality in Dreamweaver: introducing basic eCommerce functions to an existing site and creating a stand-alone eCommerce solution with PHP and MySQL. The course explores choosing a payment vendor, creating a simple buy button with PayPal, configuring a store with the Cartweaver 4 extension for Adobe Dreamweaver, adding products and discounts, and managing inventory. The course also provides guidance on securing an eCommerce site, preparing for the site’s launch, and effectively promoting a store.
Lynda.com is the leading online trained for the web developer/designer community for good reason. From the author/trainer standpoint they are an absolute joy to work with, their professionalism and quality of work is unparalleled. From student perspective, the experience is the same. If you are looking for a video course that looks at adding eCommerce to to your skill set, be sure to look at my new course at Lynda.com, and while you are there, take a look around at their amazing training library. this site is an invaluable resource. You can sign up for $25 bucks a month, with no term commitment, which is about the best deal I have ever seen.
4 Responses to New Video Training Course For Lynda.com
Kevin April 1, 2013
In the course “Building an Ecommerce Web Site Dreamweaver with PHP”, Chapter 5 doesn’t show how to actually integrate cartweaver into a new design. Where can I get hands on training placing cartweaver into an already existing design. Thanks
Lawrence April 6, 2013
Hi Kevin,
The best way to do this is to first install Cartweaver into a new blank site locally and get it set up and running. Once you have done this open the open the default index.php file in your browser and take a few minutes to look at how the different possible navigation setting look and click on the “see code” link to see what the actual code snippet looks. This is a good exercise to get familiar with it. Even in your other site you may want to rename this file to examples.php or something so you can refer back to it.
Next, one by one open the presentation files, such as product.php and look at it in code view. You will easily see the Cartweaver code snippets and where to place then, either in the head or in the body where you want them to appear. The easiest way to go is simply copy this code over to your designed pages to add the functionality. Once you get accustomed to this you wil be able to add the Cartweaver functionality into your own page designs very quickly.
anniebee58 May 20, 2012
Although I agree with your comments about Lynda.com being one of the best places to learn about web design and developing it is also a great venue for software companies to sell their applications. The course “Building an Ecommerce Web Site Dreamweaver with PHP” had so far been a great learning experience. Unfortunately I couldn’t finish the most important part of the course because I needed to purchase Cartweaver for $300.00 to complete it. I can see how this could be very irritating to those customers who had recently purchased Dreamweaver which is not cheap either. It’s too bad that the instructor didn’t use a eCommerce application that was more accessible to the students with limited budgets. It would also been great if Cartweaver offered even a one week trial period just to complete the course. So to my chagrin I’ve been forced to look for other venues that can teach me what I was trying to learn with this course.
Lawrence June 23, 2012
Hi Annie,
Thank you for the kind words on the course. I also understand about your comment on using a commercial application as an example. We talked about this at length in the planning sessions while developing the course. The truth of the matter is, there are not good open source eCommerce apps that work as a Dreamweaver extension. and the Course was specifically targeting Dreamweaver users that presumably are more visual designers than code developers. so that’s the reasoning behind it.
With that being said, I made sure to cover all the basics you would need to move forward with an open source solution, such as OsCommerce or the like. the primary principles the course covers about setting up a local development environment, setting up a database, locally testing, then moving a site to a live host – all this totally applies to developing an opensource application.
I invite you to give that a try. The one downside is that most opensource ecommerce apps are geared for the experienced developer, someone who is ready willing and able to dive in and start setting inline variables and looking at lines of code. This is the “price” you pay for open source.
In the course we also cover how to add PayPal buttons to a site which is a very good alternative for a site that is just selling a few items. So, while we did use Cartweaver as an example for the latter half of the course, you’ll see that we tried to make it as beneficial as possible for everyone.
Lawrence Cramer