A few pointers please

You seem to be on the right track. The answer to all of your questions is "Yes".

Welcome to the CMSB community. You have made a wise choice.
You want to be sure you supply the names of the product list page and the product detail page in the Viewers tab of the Section editor. It will then generate the proper PHP code for the list page and the detail page. You need to generate each one separately.
Don't hesitate to post questions on this forum. There is always someone willing to help.

Thanks for the tips guys, at least I am heading in the right direction. Ron - I hadnt spotted that one as yet but have now made a note and I think I have found the relative section. Talking of relative, does it make a difference if I use relative or absolute paths, is there a prefered method ?
Edit:
Something else has just just occured to me, how do I differentiate what information is displayed on the list page and the detail page ?

You only want to supply the page names ... like product_list.php and product_details.php. All generated code is relative to the root. Try to stay away from using absolute paths since it makes moving a site very difficult.

The code generator only supplies the functions to access the database and the variables necessary to display the data. You can use as much or as little of the code as necessary to accomplish the task of creating a list or a single page. The _link variable in the list page code contains the URL to the detail page so if you wanted the product name or the product image to link to the detail for that product, you would use $record['_link'] in the statement with $record['product_name'].

Like this ... <a href="<?php echo $record['_link'] ?>"><?php echo $record['product_name'] ?></a>

I have a project to finish this morning but later will try to put together a little sample app for you to get you past the initial learning curve. Once you get a grip on the concepts, the sky is the limit as to what you can accomplish with very little knowledge of PHP and SQL.

Thanks Ron - that would be a great help. So the bottom line is I need to populate my records with plenty of fields then I can pick and choose which ones display on either the list page or detail page ?
I think I am getting it now, I can see this is going to be a very powerful tool.

Hey ... I'm sorry for not following up on the sample code. For the past few days I have been fighting hosting server issues. It seems someone exploited one of my sites that was vulnerable to attack ... the only site that has Wordpress installed. I downloaded the Exploit Scanner and have been checking all my sites and have found no other threats so far.

I will have some time now to help get you started if you still need help. Email me directly from my profile so I can email you any sample code aside from the forum.

Ron, Thanks very much. Ive been having a good play around and discovered a few things. My biggest issue at the moment is getting the two or three upload thumbnails to display in seperate tables.......

Any tips you have would be most welcome.

Hi,

I just sent you an email with an example.

When you have images appearing in different columns in a html table, one option is to setup different upload fields for each column.

Let me know if you have any questions about this or any other setup questions.