creating single sign-in with scheduling feature

[afmastro]

Hello Everyone,

I posted this same message before. I apologize for being redundent. It's just that only 2 people (1 being myself) viewed this message and I thought if I made two changes maybe I would get more views and maybe a response. First of all, I forgot to sign in before and showed up as a guest. Second of all, I changed the subject line. I thought being anonymous before, turned people off. If I have to do some playing around on my own I will, but I'm hoping someone has some direction for me. I'm trying to avoid unnecessary headeachs. Thanks in advance.

Disclaimer: I'm new to PHP, mySQL, and Apache. I've been using the OSCommerce shopping cart for a few months. I try to do my homework before posting, and I'm posting because I want to learn the right things and not go down the wronge path and waste valuable time.

Here's the situation: I have an existing OSCommerce shopping cart on my site and would like to add an appointment booking feature on my site. I decided to outsource the appointment booking feature to another company, who will be creating an online scheduling feature on another server. Once this is complete it will be linked to my site.

The challenge is that I do not want visitors to have to register separately for the store and the online appointment booking features.

I asked my appointment booking company if there is any way to integrate my exisiting shopping cart registration with the appointment booking registration. They suggested creating a https request with the POST method. I would put a sting somewhere in one of the OSCommerce documents with a URL and request parameters, which I already know.

The result would be that the visitor would launch the scheduling interface in a new window (on top of my web site). Once a visitor finishes scheduling an appointment, the scheduling interface window would close.

My questions are:

In which document would I put the https request, would it be create_account.php or configure.php? I've discovered that OSCommerce had identically named files in the /catalog/ folder and the /languages/ folder and that /languages/ is for modifying text. I'm guessing that the files I want to modify would not be in the /languages/ folder.

Where would I put this request in the document and what would it look like?

Here's what I do know: I did a search on google with "PHP + post + https" and I got many documents that mentioned this add-on technology called PERL that is to be used with PHP. I found out my hosting service, who provided the OSCommerce shopping cart, does not support PERL yet, but they get many requests for it and might support it in the future. However this doesn't help me now, and I'm hoping there's a work-around for this. You'd think if the host provides OSCommerce, they would support PERL, but what can I do?

I've done a search through these forums with the terms, https and post, and have not found an answer.

I realize posting on this forum is only a starting point. I realize I may be in over my head. Please, please help me

[afmastro]

I wrote Perl, but meant cURL. Please don't make fun of me. I really am new.