Project Documentation
Author: Dignesh Solanki · Student Number: 110173120 · Course: COMP3340-91-R-2026S — World Wide Web Info System Dev
Overview
BrewLeaf is a browsable catalogue of coffee and tea with per-product size/grind options, a cart that works for guests and logged-in customers, checkout with order history, product reviews, a full admin back office, a public help wiki, and a live backend status monitor.
It's built with plain PHP and no framework or build step -- every .php file is
requested directly by the web server, talking to MySQL through raw mysqli. That
deploys to any standard shared PHP host with nothing to compile.
Tech Stack
Server: PHP 8, procedural style, no Composer packages.
Data: MySQL/MariaDB via mysqli, prepared statements throughout.
Client: plain JavaScript, one small file per behaviour, no third-party JS libraries
anywhere on the site. Styling: hand-written CSS on custom-property tokens, with
four swappable theme files.
Seeded Accounts
| Username | Password | Role |
|---|---|---|
| admin | Admin123! | admin |
| jsmith | Admin123! | customer |
Architecture
Every request loads the same small chain: config/db.php (database connection),
includes/auth.php (session + role helpers), includes/functions.php
(shared helpers like h() and money()), the shared
includes/header.php, the page's own logic and markup, then
includes/footer.php. There's no router -- the URL is the file path.
Folders: config/ (db connection + base URL), includes/ (shared
header/footer/auth), admin/ (6 back-office pages), help/ (5-article
public + admin wiki), assets/css and assets/js (one file per
component/behaviour), and sql/schema.sql (full schema + seed data).
Database
9 InnoDB tables. selected_options on cart_items/order_items
stores a JSON array rather than a foreign key, since one product can have multiple option groups
(Size and Grind) selected on a single line.
| Table | Role |
|---|---|
users | Customers and admins in one table; role splits them, status lets an admin disable an account instead of deleting it. |
products | 20 seeded rows (10 coffee, 10 tea); rating_avg/rating_count are cached aggregates; is_active is a soft-hide flag. |
product_options | One row per variant value (e.g. Size / 500g) with its own price modifier. |
reviews | Star rating (1-5) + comment, tied to one product and one user. |
cart_items | Lines for a logged-in user (user_id) or a guest (session_id). |
orders | Header row per checkout: pending → processing → shipped → delivered / cancelled. |
order_items | Snapshots product name/price/options at purchase time, so past orders stay accurate if the product changes later. |
site_settings | Key/value store; today holds one key, active_theme. |
service_status | Rows polled and rewritten by monitor.php on every visit. |
Roles & Access
The site separates the customer experience from the admin one, enforced server-side, not just by hiding buttons in the UI. Customers/guests see Home, Shop, Coffee, Tea, About, Help, Contact, a live cart badge, and an account menu. Admins see a different nav instead -- Storefront, Dashboard, Products, Orders, Customers -- with no Cart link, no cart badge, and no Add-to-Cart controls anywhere.
cart.php, checkout.php, cart_add.php, and
cart_update.php all check is_admin() (reading the session role set at
login) before doing anything, and reject admins regardless of what the client sends -- verified
directly by sending a raw request to cart_add.php bypassing the UI entirely, which
still gets rejected.
Public Pages
| Page | Auth | What it does |
|---|---|---|
index.php | open | Home page: hero, roast video, category tabs, catalogue chart. |
products.php / product.php | open | Catalogue with search/filter/sort, and a product page with option pills + live price + reviews. |
login.php / register.php | open | Bcrypt password hashing, validation, auto-login after registration. |
profile.php | login required | Edit account details + full order history. |
monitor.php | open | Runs 6 live checks (DB ping, table existence, session) every request. |
Cart & Checkout
Quantity changes and removals save in the background over AJAX (cart_update.php),
with a spinner and disabled buttons while the request is in flight, an error banner if it fails
(reverting a quantity edit to its last saved value rather than showing a stale number), and a
confirmation prompt before removing a line. Checkout wraps the whole conversion in one database
transaction -- insert order, insert every line item, clear the cart, commit -- and rolls all of it
back if anything fails. Card fields are collected but never validated or stored, by design (a
school-project demo, no real payment is processed).
Admin Panel
Dashboard
KPI cards, a 14-day revenue chart (zero-filled so every day shows, not just days with a sale), and a live service-status snapshot.
Products
Search, category/status filters, pagination, add/edit/delete, and inline management of each product's option rows.
Orders
Update any order's status from a whitelisted set; customers see the change instantly.
Customers
List every account, disable/enable (can't disable your own).
Charts
Both charts on the site -- the home page's "Catalogue at a Glance" and the admin dashboard's
revenue chart -- are plain HTML and CSS, no charting library and no CDN. PHP works out each bar's
height as a percentage of the highest value and renders it as a styled <div>;
the browser does the rest.
Theming
Four CSS files share the same variable names; whichever theme file loads last wins, so
switching themes (White, Regular, Autumn, Winter) is a single database write from
admin/theme.php, applied to every visitor immediately.
SEO
Every page sets a title and description before including the shared header.
sitemap.php generates an XML sitemap of every static page plus every active
product, live from the database.
Security Model
| Mechanism | Status |
|---|---|
| Password storage | bcrypt |
| SQL injection defense | prepared statements |
| XSS defense | h() escaping everywhere |
| Role enforcement | server-side |
| CSRF protection | none found |
| Session handling | no regeneration |
Known Gaps
No CSRF tokens on any state-changing form. No session_regenerate_id() call on
login (a session-fixation gap).
Running Locally
mysql -u root -e "CREATE DATABASE brewleaf CHARACTER SET utf8mb4;", then
mysql -u root brewleaf < sql/schema.sql, then php -S localhost:8000.
config/db.php targets localhost / root / no password /
database brewleaf by default.