Over on DevArtciles.com this morning, they have a very nice story about Building A Persistent Shopping Cart With PHP and MySQL. I know there are tons of people out there looking for things like this to integrate into their website - most want some thing that they can just drag and drop into it (yeah, thanks a lot Bill Gates) and make it magically work. Most people don't realize that it takes a little work to make things work correctly - even on the best of e-commerce systems. This article provides a good foundation to start from, and suggests using a cookie to store user information "magically" for them when they leave you site - so that when they come back, they can have their cart right there. The scripts they provide here aren't a big, massive, feature-packed shopping cart solution by any means - but they are a good solid skeleton that any good programmer can build a nice system off of.

And, although it's not really a PHP story, it's still interesting that people would go this far to make a page for the people accessing it. This article over on SitePoint talks about "page cloaking" or the practice of altering contents of a page depending on the software, method and/or IP address being used to access it. Bascially, your page changes based on who's looking at it - be it a spider crawling your pages or the Average Joe looking for the latest sports scores. It's an interesting idea - instead of sending the same content to everyone and just making sure it's compatible, they suggest using this idea to show different things to different people. Obvously, there's potential for abuse - like showing the search engine crawlers completely different pages with more meta tags and such than the normal user - but it still could be useful in other ways.