Speaking of PHP, I wrote my first ‘proper’ (well sort of) PHP application only a month or so ago. I’ve had to modify (i.e. hack) a few applications in the past, but this was the first time I’d sat down with a blank slate, so to speak.

And, of course, what I wound up writing was the ubiquitous shopping cart — a function sure to elicit little excitement and a large number of yawns.

In this case, my app is a plugin for WordPress — allowing a WP post to be associated with a product (i.e. product per post), assigning values such as price, quantity and product title to that post, and then using sessions to store the information in the cart (actual orders are, of course, stored in the database). It seems that while the number of examples of shopping carts in various languages is approaching infinite, there are only a few related plugins available for WordPress (a google search for “wordpress shopping cart” comes up with a measly 520,000 items . Interestingly, one of the few I came across was created by an NZ company (or person) — however, none of the plugins I found really satisfied my needs. Hence the creation of yet another shopping cart.

I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for the last week or 2 waiting for sourceforge to approve the project, only to discover it’s been created, but my notification has gone astray.

(Note: Nothing there yet, but there will be)