April 2006 – chinasprout.com

[AnonymousParticipant]

Website: http://www.chinasprout.com/

Description: ChinaSprout provides Chinese cultural and educational products as well as online community services to anyone with an interest in Chinese culture. Their products include books, music, Chinese arts & crafts, toys, apparel, and more. The target audience includes, but is not limited to, families that have adopted children from China, Chinese Americans, bi-cultural/racial families, and anyone who is interested in Chinese culture. In addition to individual customers, ChinaSprout support institutions (such as schools and libraries) that serve Chinese new immigrants as well as stores that are generally interested in Asian culture and promote Asian life-styles.

Focus of newsletter: php/MySQL – This month’s newsletter talks about using php and MySQL in your website. The ChinaSprout website itself is fully query-driven and was built with php and MySQL. The build of the site was done with the MVC (Model-View-Controller) design pattern in mind. The presentation is separate from the business logic and the database backend. Smarty templates are used for the presentation (View), php for the embedded logic (Controller) and several Pear packages (DB, authentication) for interfacing with the database backend (Model). This separation allows ChinaSprout to make rapid changes to the website and keep the content fresh. Whenever you click on a category on the website, browse through a product listing or view a product detail, you also initiate a query against the MySQL database and build the page dynamically. Using this technology, bestsellers can be calculated on the fly and promotions can be published directly to the website, without going through an elaborate publishing and approval process.

Technologies used: The primary focus of the ChinaSprout website is ecommerce, and the site uses ShopSite to achieve this goal. They utilize ShopSite’s secure e-commerce functions for credit card processing, shipping calculations and merchandizing tools, such as coupons, gift certificates, rewards programs (buy-one-get-one-free), and associate programs. They also use several Lexiconn developed ShopSite add-on modules for increased functionality. ChinaSprout offers more than 4,500 products in over 150 categories on the website. To maintain this volume, they have built a custom backoffice for employees to manage products, inventory, suppliers and purchases. Orders are downloaded in batches and processed with StoneEdge’s Order Manager. An RSS feed is also being used for customers who need more frequent updates on new products and promotions, above and beyond the bi-weekly HTML newsletter that ChinaSprout offers.

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