PHP 101: cartweaver (Pro's please help!)

[IAuchmoody27]

Hi,
My name is Ian, and I’m trying to make a put together an eCommerce website. The site is for selling boxes. We have an inventory of specific boxes of specific dimensions, specific styles, board grades, and so on. I’m using Dreamweaver and to try to make my life easier I bought an extension: CartWeaver. We want a certain template to display the boxes such as a table to orderly display all of these specs per box: style, length, width, depth, board, grade, print, used. I thought the best way to do this would be to add a field for each of those variables to the product database, and then add the input areas to the ‘add/update product’ form. The problem here is that I don’t really know much about PHP and digging through the CW code has proven itself to be a very sticky situation. I’ve never made a website, let alone a dynamic eCommerce site and after about 1 month of work I’m getting very desperate just to make this thing work.
I have done a bit or work on the site. I have a layout, I’ve added the variables to the database, and made a working form for adding products. (for some reason updating existing products isn’t working.)
So what I am looking for is a PHP guru who is willing to connect with me via email, phone, IM to work with me on this site, show me how it works and such. I’m looking for someone who really knows their stuff so we can just get this job done, if you’re professional I can hire you.
Thanks,
Ian

[badben]

Building an e-commerce website from scratch is a daunting task for anybody and will take up a lot of your time. Even a simple system will need integrating with some form of payment system and again when you are dealing with online payments I would suggest that only an experienced developer should attempt it purely for the security.

I would suggest that unless you are proficient and more importantly have a very good knowledge of the security issues I would go with an open source e-commerce system like either Zencart, Opencart or Magento etc. Not only are they all free but they also have a simple cms facility built in.

Zencart is a time tested system that you should be able to set up in a matter of minutes although the standard templates are a bit outdated with a bit of design flare and basic css you should be able to get a good looking site running in a weekend. Not only that but the amount of modules that are available to add different features is impressive. There is a large community behind Zencart as well so if you get into problems there is usually somebody else who has had the same problem on the forum.

Magento is a very complex system but has an immense amount of built in features. I wouldn't suggest this unless you have a VPS or dedicated hosting package otherwise it will be very slow. More importantly it's the least intuitive system to administer.

Opencart is a basic system but the built in standard templates are very good and again you should be able to get a site up and running in a weekend. There are not too many modules available for opencart but if the out of the box version has the features you need this would be my suggestion.

If you need some pointers setting up one of the above systems send me a message and I will try my best, but I doubt you would find somebody willing to give up the amount of time required to build from scratch without some form of financial reward.