Archives For MySQL

I just posted a couple of support pages for the 2nd edition of my “Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL” book. The main URL for the book is:

https://www.larryullman.com/books/effortless-e-commerce-with-php-and-mysql-2nd-edition/

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I recently came across an article titled “9 Ways to Make the Payment Process Easy for Online Customers”. The article describes nine best practices for e-commerce sites: what you should do to have the best possible conversion rate. I definitely stress most, if not all, of these points in my “Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL” book, but they are policies and approaches worth repeating. If you do any kind of web development, and especially if you do e-commerce, give this quick article a read. The only thing the article leaves out is how to convince your client that you’re right when it comes to implementing these policies, especially the one about not requiring accounts to complete orders!

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Whenever you begin working with a database, you introduce more possible causes of errors. Thus, you must learn additional debugging strategies. When using PHP to run queries on the database, the problems you might encounter include:

An inability to connect to the database
A database error thrown because of a query
The query not returning the results or having the effect that you expect
None of the above, and yet, the output is still incorrect
On a non-framework site, you just need to watch for database errors to catch the first two types of problems. There’s a simple and standard approach for debugging the last two types:

Use PHP to print out the query being run.
Run the same query using another interface to confirm the results.
Debug the query until you get the results you want.
When using a framework, these same debugging techniques are a little less obvious, in part because you may not be directly touching the underlying SQL commands. Thankfully, Yii will still be quite helpful, if you know what switches to flip.

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A couple of quick updates on “The Yii Book” and its corresponding website, yii.larryullman.com…

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Just a quick update on the status of “The Yii Book” (the project that never ends)…

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