MacNative

I have worked with many different e-commerce platforms over the years, From very basic to extremely complex. I have recently come across a relatively new e-commerce platform that has got me hooked.

FoxyCart has created a great set of e-commerce tools that allow you to easily set up a fully functional online store/shopping cart with very minimal effort.
Foxycart offers support for either Paypal payments pro (for credit card payments only at the moment) or some of the more popular payment gateways. as well as support for live shipping rates from Fedex, UPS, etc.
All in all, foxycart packs a nice sales punch. And is my shopping cart solution of choice.

www.foxycart.com

Foxycart Demo Store

One of my biggest concerns when building a dynamic website is, “How do I validate the users input?”

Obviously there are many different ways to do this, you can validate the data on the back end as it receiving script is processing, and send an error, requesting that the user input correct information. Or you can do Front end processing on the data when the form is submitted and through JavaScript tell the user that the data is not correct, or you can validate the data as the client is inputing the information, thus allowing the client to correct the error before continuing on (especially useful in large/long forms). Or a combination of the 3, validate on the fly, on submit, and on return.

There is a myriad of different front end scripts that have popped up to handle the front end/live validation, one that I started using was LiveValidation, It was a useful library, but Since I was already using MooTools anyway, there was additional overhead to use this additional library, as well as the validation messages all appeared inline with your other content, and this tended to be a difficult thing to work with in cramped conditions.

This led me to search around a bit more and I found Formcheck, A live validation script based on mootools. It was lighter weight, since it was using the library that I was already using. The configuration/integration was about 100 times easier to implement and manage. And the notification appeared as a hovering box rather than and inline notification, which was just the icing on the cake.

Light, Easy, and Pretty, who could ask for more.

Formcheck Demo

Formcheck Documentation

Formcheck Download

http://moo.floor.ch/

My JavaScript framework of choice is MooTools. MooTools is a very compact, useful, and extensible JavaScript framework. I have used it on several sites that I and my codevelopers have created, I have been impressed by how easy the integration is, the speed of development with MooTools is amazing. It doesn’t carry the bloat that similar frameworks carry with them, ie: Prototype. All in all a very exciting platform to work with.

I look forward to the enhancements that will be made available with the 1.2 release. Exciting.

In later posts I will share and discuss scripts that use/extend the base functionality of MooTools to create some very amazing, usability enhancing, tools and effects.