Please help! FM7 web store??

[n1k0]

Hey, thanks for reading this!

I've just put together a snazzy FM7+FM7 Server contact/inventory/sales db for a friend with a small business, including eAuthorize for credit card sales. It seems like it should be a small step to let her publish to the web, and I'm sure it's been talked about and implemented left and right, but I can't find any FM Forums posts on it, other than someone saying "Try a Lasso or PHP driven website with MySQL/FM databases." Huh??? Google isn't helping much, and FileMaker.com only has a .pdf doc on "The FileMaker Web Store", published in November 2000, so that's useless

Any suggestions on how to go about doing this?

Any ideas on resources/tools/links/things to avoid?

Thanks in advance!

n1k0

[Reed]

Since FM7 Server Advanced isn't available yet, there aren't really too many web options available....

FM7 can only do IWP, and it doesn't offer any encryption. Once FM7 server advanced is out, there will be several options for web publishing:

1. XML/XSL (Filemaker's replacement for CDML)

2. Lasso will surely be updated to work with FM7

3. FX (PHP) should be updated as well.

I think that server advanced will be out in August.

[Steve T.]

Howdy! Yeah, I think FileMaker web stores were kinda in limbo for a while. There used to be 3rd party products that let you integrate FM db's w/eCommerce but it's been a while since I've heard anything (before Mac OS X was out). The Lasso or PHP reference has to do with serving the web store with Apache (which has encryption capability) and using FM only as the db. FileMaker could not do eCommerce safely as a standalone product (i.e. financial transactions like ccn's), but it can be used on the backend if you use more standard web technology like Apache and use Lasso or PHP to act as middleware to process web-submitted data and interact w/the db.

As Reed mentions, many of us are waiting for FM7 Server Advanced for a number of reasons. If you do not have to actually do transactions, then you can use FMP4 or FMP5-6 Unlimited to web publish a catalog or information. You may be able to handle financial transactions using PayPal or another service if you have to have it, but I'd just recommend taking orders by phone, or at least for "finalizing" a web order by calling with your ccn and sales order number.

--ST

[Reed]

I've just seen something on FMwebschool that shows how to integrate your FM site with Paypal, so you don't have to have an encrypted site or accept credit card info directly.

[WMJOBSPINFM]

Hi, actually I want to reinitiate this question. I have FM 7 adv server and want to integrate a solution similar to above to turn our static web site into an e-commerce web site.

Any new suggestions, now that FM7 Adv server is available?

[Garry Claridge]

Look at using PHP.

All the best.

Garry

[kstatham]

Hello,

I'm looking into a professional shopping cart solution that uses PHP/MySQL. Does it sound reasonable to be able to use PHP to have this shopping cart interact with our internal FM7 database (Since I'm hearing that we can now use PHP with FM7, and could not before)?

We don't want to reinvent the ecommerce wheel, but there are no professional shopping cart solutions out there for Filemaker, that I can find, and even if one shows up on the market tomorrow, it won't have the years of testing, or the huge community of users to draw feedback from.

So, to reiterate my question, how difficult would it be to use PHP to communicate, or syncronize two databases, the MySQL database that the shopping cart uses, and the FM7 database that we use internally for our membership information (we're a membership driven non-profit).

Thanks in advance, and sorry for the length.

Ken

[kstatham]

Sorry, I've just found several answers to my own question in other threads in this forum.