cash or credit card

I wish to be able to accept cash or charge with the information captured into your order history. I saw 2 different responses to how to do this from 2006. Now that this is 2010 with my version 4, what is the best way to handle both methods? Please explain.
Thanks

When it comes to collecting billing information like credit card details you should not be storing this in your db. There are many rules, regulations, and laws that govern storing this type of information and in general it is not appropriate to do so on your site.

If you have a cash or bill me option and the user is forced to login before proceeding with the checkout you can store the order and details in your database tables and have a column to indicate that the order has been paid for or not. When you receive payment you can update the order to indicate that it has been paid for. The main difference with this type of checkout is that you would skip the local checkout server behavior that makes the transaction.

I don't mean storing credit card info I mean the order details that you normally store in your "detail page" after being linked from your "orders page" just like your examples but the customer pays cash. So when I get to the "checkout page", how do I collect cash & still have the payment of cash reflect in your tbl_orders and tbl_details without going through paypal?
Also if I put a hidden field in your "order display page" or somewhere else like the checkout page, how would I get it to insert into the tbl_orders? Would I have to make it a session variable or would it "POST" to the table even after going through paypal? Please example as I'm trying to add additional info into the table that I would have already collected from the customer .
Thanks

I'm a little confused about how you would like this to work. From the perspective of the user they will be logged into your site and choose items to add to the cart. When they get to the checkout page they would enter their information there. You would want to store this information along with the order details.

From this point I'm not sure how you would like it to work. How are you collecting the cash from them? It is when you collect the cash that you should update the order to reflect that payment has been made.