Cart form tag numbering

Hello,
I have a problem that seems huge to me, being a non programmer, but maybe someone in your group has a thought about it? I would sure appreciate it!

I am developing a website for my photography company and have Adobe Online Photo Album to generate web galleries for my clients to view their photos from their event. I am using Americart (but not stuck on that) for the shopping cart. The Photo Album does a fine job of generating the albums, but I need to automate the shopping cart add in peice. I did it manually for 80 photos and it took forever. In other words, I have an easy table containing the 4 sizes of photos they can purchase of the photo above, each of the sizes an "add to cart" button within the table, within a form tag. The tedious part is that I then have to go in an change each photo number within the form tag for each photo, for each of the four sizes.

There must be a way to have the shopping cart table, just a small bit of code, to take the first photo number and automatically increase each number by one within each form tag, for each size. In other words, I want that table which actually has four form tags within it, one for each size, to automatically increase the photo number by one and drop itself into the designated spot on my already generated html pages which have been generated by Online Photo Album.

Doesn't it seem that there would be a relatively straightforward way to do this? Given that I will have many rolls per week of film to get onto my site, I just can't see spending several hours each roll to change all those photo numbers in each table...

Any help would be so VERY VERY much appreciated!! THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR ANY THOUGHTS! Even just some direction about what universe of code this solution would live in would be helpful!

The sample photo album I have created which I hand coded the shopping cart is at http://www.tri-visions.com/clientaccess/neil/index.html
Laura van Hoff
Lvanhoff@sbcglobal.net
www.tri-visions.com

What about using ONE form (why confuse things by using more than one?!)
Under each size, have a radio button. The name of the radio would be "size", and the value would be each photo's size (e.g. 5x11, 8x12, etc)
The user would select one of the pix (by clicking the radio button) then click the "Add to cart" button (of which there'll only be one on the page).

This will submit a form containing size field and & value.

As a side note: the system you are attempting to build is going to be a nightmare to maintain (as you are finding). Something like this really should be written using a server-side language. Using a language like ASP or PHP, the system would essentially maintain itself. All you would have to do is upload the photo's.

You are so right, it is a nightmare. I just don't know PHP but it seems the way to go.

Is there a straightforward path to learn enough PHP to accomplish this do you think? I am a total non programmer.

Thanks for your advice...I agree that it should be coded to be automatic...just don't know how to do it!

Thanks!

A lot of the guys on this forum are self taught (I had a background in C & VB, so moving to ASP was simple), but there are a lot of good books out that will get you going in any language you like. Do a search on these forums, and google.

Thanks...do you think PHP is the best way to go?

Ah - you'll see that question debated everywhere! There's no correct answer - read up on the languages that are on offer (ASP, PHP, JSP, C#, VB.NET, Python, etc). Read up on the various platforms that run these languages (the main ones Window/IIS, Linux/Apache).

The main two that are used are ASP & PHP. There is a massive amount of online community support for both languages, but most people will recommend reading a book, and getting the basics down first.

Ok...thanks very much.