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Building E-Commerce Sites with Handel
by Christopher H. Laco | Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Checkout

On the cart page, hit the Checkout button. This will take you to the BillTo/ShipTo edit screen (Figure 6).

BillTo/ShipTo Edit Page Screenshot
Figure 6. The BillTo/ShipTo page

In either of the first name fields, enter your first name. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Continue. If everything is working correctly, you should see a page resembling Figure 7.

BillTo/ShipTo Error Page Screenshot
Figure 7. An error in billing/shipping

Once again, the generated code from Handel has taken care of validating required form fields for you and the fill-in forms kept the data you entered, all without writing any code. (Noticing a theme yet?)

Take some time on your own to work your way through the rest of the checkout process. This includes a preview page, the credit card payment page, and an order completion page. Once you've completed your order, you should receive a "thank you" page with links to view all of your orders (Figure 8).

Order Complete Page Screenshot
Figure 8. The Order Complete page

Orders List

Last but not least, check out the orders list. On your order completion screen, click on the View Orders link. Here you will find a list of any orders you have placed (Figure 9). Click the View Order link next to any order for more details about that order (Figure 10).

Orders List Page Screenshot
Figure 9. The Orders List page.

Order Details Page Screenshot
Figure 10. The order details page

Where To Go From Here

As you've hopefully seen in the article, by combining the powers of Handel and Catalyst, you need not suffer through the dreary task of writing another shopping cart from scratch ever again. With the plugin architecture Handel provides, you will find that you can do even the more complicated checkout tasks using nothing more than a few lines of code to glue various business modules into plugins.

With Handel as the core, we can look forward to new and improved Perl-based E-commerce solutions and new ways to add E-commerce features to existing projects without having to reinvent the wheel--again!