An Auto Dealers Inventory?

[UsedCarMan]

I have a small used car dealership. I do the website, now i know already your thinking oh great some frontpage using noob lol but not the case. I do my layouts primarily in photoshop and slice them up and publish w/ dreamweaver. So my question is some higher end sites have almost flash looking inventory pages but i know flash can be a pain when i need to update every single week, or multiple times a week. (e.g. http://iqautos.com/Inventory.aspx, and or http://www.georgiacarcenter.com/carsforsale.aspx) now if you click a particular vehicle it takes you to a page with more pictures and detailed info. is this built almost like an excel spreadsheet with a place to enter the data and it will populate those fields? Any suggestions / links / help would be greatly appreciated.Thanks in Advance,Used.

[clonetrooper9494]

You might be able to find software that would do it for your, but what I would do is make a Database with the cars and prices and other info.Then I would make an admin page requiring a password where you would be able to edit all of the cars and info in the database, and have a public page that would display all of the cars like those other sites.You should probably start reading up on the MySql/PHP tutorials at W3 too if you plan on using a database.

[smerny]

using php and mysql, you could could have a mysql database that has all the information on your inventory (a car per row)... with fields like: ID(which would be an auto increment for your website to reference)status (to indicate if it's in inventory or if it's sold or whatever)priceyearmakemodelVINmilesenginecolorfeaturesand then you could use a query something like...SELECT * FROM inventory WHERE status=available ORDER BY IDand have php loop it so that it goes through every row (vehicle) where the status is "available", before the loop you could start a table like... <table><tr><th>YEAR</th><th>MAKE</th>...etc</tr>and in the loop have...<tr><td>$row['year']</td><td>$row['make']</td>...etc</tr>and after the loop end the table...</table>and this would create a table with all the vehicles you have in your database with the status available... now you'd probably want it so they can click on the vehicle and see more details... you can create a link within the loop also using the ID something like <a href='inventory.php?id=".$row['ID']."'>View Details</a>and then your inventory.php page could get that information using $_GET['id']... would be something like...

if(isset($_GET['id'])){ //run a query to get information on the vehicle with that id (SELECT * FROM inventory WHERE ID='".$_GET['id']."') //and display the information on the page... so you basically only create 1 page which is sort of a template that will put information from any car in your inventory on it depending on the end of the URL (www.yoursite.com/inventory.php?id=1 would show the first car you load into the database)}else{ //list the whole inventory if $_GET['id'] isn't set}

[justsomeguy]

It looks like the interface for the IQ site is done using Javascript, they have an iframe that loads the table with all the vehicles in it. An iframe is one way to do that, they could also use an ajax request to get the content from the server and fill it out on the page. You won't be able to find something pre-made to do all of that, but you can find a Javascript framework that makes things like ajax and adding content easier to do. That specific interface is something that someone built for them though, that's not just a plug-in thing.You *could* use Flash for this, you could have a Flash movie that sends out a request to get the data from the database, but there aren't really any advantages to using Flash over anything else in this case.

[UsedCarMan]

ok cool! Thanks you guys! Great INFO!!!!!