Revisiting Gopher-Commerce: FRST Gopher Store Launches!
====

I'm still working on it, but I've hacked a bit of PHP to create a
functional mechanism for placing orders for my FRST Computer stuff
via Gopher.  I've been sticking with Motsognir (because I resolved my
earlier dilemma by patching Motsognir to produce Apache-style access
logs) so I decided to try the built-in PHP support and you know what?
It's great.  It's great to be writing PHP code again, actually.  It's
been a damn long time, and it's been a fun trip down coding memory
lane.  While I had cut my teeth on BASIC and C, PHP was really the
first language I felt truly proficient in, building actual, functional
things with it.

My collection of scripts makes up a very function-over-form
shopping cart experience for Gopher.  It allows visitors to the
frstcomputer.com gopher hole to add items to a cart, add personal
details and submit their order for processing.  This is made possible
by PHP's session management -- done in the fashion of the pre-cookie
web -- passing session IDs around between requests.  Yeah, it's not
secure.  I'll be adding a few features to improve that security,
(slightly) but basically, it doesn't matter especially in this case.
(Especially given that FRST gets about 2 visitors a week ;) )

Anyway... I'll be cleaning up things a bit in the days ahead, but it's
serviceable, I think, so I'm posting about it and maybe hoping a few
folks try it out, if only to place an order for a sticker or two. :)

## Postscript:

I had considered using this gopher cart system thing as an excuse to
learn more Lisp, (really wanted to use Chicken Scheme for this) but
PHP proved to be the most ready tech for building this out.
Maybe I'll revisit this in the future, but for now, PHP FTW!

[1] gopher://frstcomputer.com
.