Archives For e-commerce

Chapters 22 and 23 of “The Yii Book” are example chapters, in which I don’t cover new material but rather put together previous material in a more complete context. These example chapters have been popular in my other books, so I thought I’d include two in this book. The specific examples I came up with are:

A blog/CMS example
An e-commerce site
The blog (Chapter 22) is a more complete version of what was commonly used as an example throughout the entire book. For the e-commerce example, I came up with the idea of selling books (imagine that!).

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As a reminder, this Thursday, January 30th, 2014, I’ll be presenting “Using, and Learning From, Stripe”, at the online eCommerce Web Summit. This is one of several conferences put together by the awesome folks behind php[architect]. Mine is one of four presentations that are part of this online e-commerce conference…

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It’s a beautiful, gorgeous, beautiful fall day here in central Pennsylvania (which is odd, because it’s late July), and it’s time for another newsletter. This is a special newsletter for me, as the topic surrounds a big change in my life. As of August 1, I’ll be working for Stripe. I officially accepted the position, and announced it, about a month ago, so you may have already known this, but I thought I’d spend a little time discussing Stripe, my personal decision, and how this might impact you. For the sake of breaking the newsletter into more readable chunks, I’ll present some content as if I’m answering a question I’ve been asked (although I actually haven’t been). Apologies for the artifice.

In another newsletter, I’ll write about my thoughts and experiences in working for myself, creating my own business, and “building up my brand”. Not that those parts of my working life are entirely switched off from here on out, but this is going to be an existential change, and there are aspects of having worked for myself for 14 years that went into the decision to join Stripe.

As always, questions, comments, and all feedback are much appreciated. And thanks for your interest in what I have to say and do!

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I am pleased to announce that I’ve just signed a contract to write the second edition of my “Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL” book, published by New Riders. The first edition was written in the fall of 2010, and has been very well received (out of 22 reviews at Amazon, 18 are 5-star). There was more I wanted to do in the first edition, and a few things have changed since the book was written, so my publisher and I felt it was time for a revision. I’ll be writing the book at the end of the summer and early fall (after I complete “The Yii Book”), with a release date in October or November.

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One of the problems with technical writing is that the instructions you provide will eventually become outdated. Some details, such as the fundamentals of a programming language like C, Ruby, or PHP, change relatively slowly. Others, like libraries, frameworks, and browsers, change frequently. And so, it was not surprising to find out that PayPal changed some of their systems a while back in a way that will affect readers of my “Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL” book. This issue first appeared last summer in my support forums, with Sean and Michael discovering the problem and the solution.

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