UCLan Shop Webapp

Student Name: Ethan Howard
Student ID: 21255926
Live Wesbite URL: https://vesta.uclan.ac.uk/~ehoward4/webtech1
Github Repo URL: https://github.com/chocbic172/year-1-webtech

Example Credentials

To test the website, the following example credentials can be used:
Username: testuser
Password: S3curePa$$w0rd

During registration, we do not ask for a users address. This is to simplify the process and encourage more users to sign up. A users address can instead be saved in the checkout stage.
Client side (in browser) form validation has been turned off to demonstrate website capabilities. In a real deployment it would be beneficial to enable this.
Prepared SQL statements are used to generate all user related INSERTs. This prevents SQL injection attacks. We also filter out HTML/XSS attacks by escaping special HTML characters.
All database functions were abtracted to utils/database.php. This significatly simplified the creation new pages as the database functionality did not have to be ported. I considered using the ORM paradigm, but decided against it due to time constraints. This seemed like a good compromise between the developer experience of ORM, and the simplicity of direct implementation.
Some common frontend UI components (navbar, footer) were saved to the components folder. They are then imported in each page, meaning an update to the component affected the design sitewide.

The main resources used during development were:

The official PHP documentation - Used extensively in researching and using the inbuilt language features of PHP.
W3 School - Used for researching features of SQL, and for some more advanced use cases of PHP classes.
MDN Web Docs - Used for researching HTML accessibility features, and for the javascript implementation of the "Add To Cart" button.