With PHP-eSeller, If you have items in category / subcategory and you wish to analyse the items sold per categtory / subcategory, then one method is to use a SQL View and export the data to a spreadsheet.

A SQL View is like a query in MS Access.  It is a combinations of a number of tables which gives you a much more convenient display.

However, Views are only supported on mySQL version 5 and above so you need to be using that version.

To create a view, go to your PHPMyAdmin interface on your server, go to the database where PHP-eSeller tables are located and in a SQL query box copy the following text :


CREATE VIEW fullsalesdetails AS
SELECT
ipn_tblsaleshistory.receiver_email,
ipn_tblsaleshistory.item_name,
ipn_tblsaleshistory.item_number,
ipn_tblmaincategory.maincategory,
ipn_tblsubcategory.SubCategory,
ipn_tblsaleshistory.quantity,
ipn_tblsaleshistory.mc_gross,
ipn_tblsaleshistory.payer_email,
ipn_tblsaleshistory.payment_date,
ipn_tblitems.item_owner
FROM ipn_tblsaleshistory INNER JOIN
((ipn_tblmaincategory INNER JOIN ipn_tblitems ON ipn_tblmaincategory.recid = ipn_tblitems.maincat_id)
INNER JOIN ipn_tblsubcategory ON ipn_tblitems.subcat_id = ipn_tblsubcategory.recid)
ON ipn_tblsaleshistory.item_id = ipn_tblitems.recid
WITH CHECK OPTION;

This will create a view called “fullsalesdetails”  Note that this assumes that when the tables were created there was no prefix used for the table name.

You can then look at this view in the same way as any table, and you can even query the view.  So you could do something like :


Select * FROM fullsalesdetails WHERE payment_date > "2008-05-01"


When using PHP-eSeller, if you are using the download login pages within https rather that http you may have to do a modification to the login_downloads_file.php

The modification is necessary to fix a bug in Internet Explorer for https SSL as explained on http://abeautifulsite.net/notebook/27 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316431

The change is to remove header(“Pragma: no-cache”); and replace with header(‘Pragma: private’);

If you are creating buy now button by hand and if you want to give customers an option when they are buying a product with PHP-eSeller, you can easily do this using a drop down list.

An example might be :

<form action="http://www.yourservername/eseller/ipn/process.php" method="post">
<select name="item_number">
<option value="">Select a product</option>
<option value="item_a">Small $1.00</option>
<option value="item_b">Medium sized file $2.00</option>
<option value="item_c">Large file $3.00</option>
</select>
<input type="image" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but23.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
</form>

You will need to create three products with item_number of item_a, item_b and item_c. The customer then selects which one they require and click the buy now button which takes them to PayPal.

If you are using an application like PHP-eSeller to sell digital files you need to make sure that your files are secure.

The best way to protect digital files (those files that you are going to sell) is to place them outside the root of your web site.

The root of the web site is normally the public_html folder or the www folder.

When placed ‘below’ these folders, it is not possible for anyone to get to those files using a web url address.

However, some hosts do not allow this, so instead you can protect your files by placing an .htaccess file in the folder.

An example .htaccess file which would do this is:

IndexIgnore *
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName Downloads
AuthType Basic

<Limit GET POST PUT>
 deny from all
</Limit>

This will only work on a Linux type server and not on a Windows server.
http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml has quite a good set of examples and gives some good background information on htaccess / htpasswd files

PHP-eSeller can display ‘buy now’ buttons and ‘add to cart’ buttons in a number of different ways.  Buttons can be created by hand and then added to existing web pages or they can be displayed dynamically through a template system.

PHP-eSeller uses the pat template system which includes a caching method to improve the speed of the pages.

When you install PHP-eSeller all you need to do is change the permissions of the template folder ‘tmplcache’ to be set to 777.

When the page is viewed, caching will be implemented and pages will display quicker.  The folder ‘tmplcache’ is part of the installation structure although it is an empty folder.

Fckeditor is used in PHP-eSeller as an HTML text editor and provides a powerful easy to use web editor. It is fully described on the web site http://www.fckeditor.net/

The main area of customisation that you may want to implement is defining the toolbar that appears above the text box which is used to enter product descriptions. We have trimmed down the toolbar buttons to make it more manageable and to remove tools that are not required all that often. However, you may want to add back in some buttons which is very easy to do.

Open up the file /fckeditor/fckeditor.js with a suitable text editor.

The toolbar that we use is called FCKConfig.ToolbarSets[“pg_toolbar”].

The default toolbar is FCKConfig.ToolbarSets[“Default”].

If you want to add a button from the default toolbar, just copy it and place it into FCKConfig.ToolbarSets[“pg_toolbar”].

Or if you want all the buttons, rename FCKConfig.ToolbarSets[“Default”] to FCKConfig.ToolbarSets[“pg_toolbar”] and remove the old FCKConfig.ToolbarSets[“pg_toolbar”].

Note that the very last button on the toolbar is used to maximise the editor window which can help if you are doing more detailed work with the html.