Forum OpenACS Q&A: ecommerce

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Posted by Mark Aufflick on
Hi all,

I have semi-successfully got the existing ecommerce package installed on a 5.3 base (after adding ref-*). It is is actually in a surprisingly useful state.

I see various references to the ecommerce-g2 packages and I'm wondering if these are at a level of usefulness of the monolithic ecommerce package or if they were a proof of concept that never quite got finished.

Can anyone comment?

Cheers.

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2: Re: ecommerce (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on
More dream than reality AFAIK. ecommerce got its start as an ACS 3x package so its integration with the 4x (sql objects) structure is incomplete, I think, though I've not looked at it for a long time. Also it has its own rating system and categorization system, it would be nice to see integration there, though the openacs categorization and ratings packages are lacking so it might involve a fair amount of work.

My contribution was more in the line of encouraging a plug-in approach to payment gateways (to make it easier to support various ones), and I think that's working quite well.

For what it does - an amazon'ish style store - I think it does OK.

Do you need commit privs in order to commit your changes? It would be nice to have it install cleanly right out of our source tree.

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3: Re: ecommerce (response to 2)
Posted by Torben Brosten on
Hi Mark,

For clarification,

ecommerce-g2 (abbreviated ec-g2) is a suite of packages that are not yet in alpha stage. Work continues at http://dekka.com/p2/xowiki/

ecommerce-2 will be a combination of the ecommerce-g2 packages that will "upgrade" an existing ecommerce package to use ec-g2 (and therefore is just a spec at this point).

ecommerce is the existing package which has a few serious limitations on OpenACS above 5.1, such as bug 2324. See bugs: https://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/?f%5fcomponent=56215&project%5fid=56106

cheers,

Torben

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4: Re: ecommerce (response to 1)
Posted by Mark Aufflick on
Thanks Torben and Don,

Torben: are the api issues referred to in the bug reports acs core changes, or an effect of the shift to postgres 8? Do you think I'm best off starting with 5.1? (I have a very tight deadline)

Don: I used to have commit rights (user marka) but they either disappeared or I have forgotten the password - if you could re-add me that would be great.

First priority will be basic functionality, but I'd like to refactor it enough to use existing core modules like categories. Gradual pragmatic refactoring should let me get quite a lot of useful functionality out I think.

Ps: it seems the email replies from my blackberry disappeared - I guess forum email replies are turned off.

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5: Re: ecommerce (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on
Gradual pragmatic refactoring should let me get quite a lot of useful functionality out I think.

Yes, this is the approach I'd recommend.

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6: Re: ecommerce (response to 4)
Posted by Don Baccus on
Mark, I've e-mailed you a new password for your account using the e-mail you've registered with here at openacs.org.

If that's not your current e-mail address, please contact me and I'll get it to you ASAP.

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7: Re: ecommerce (response to 4)
Posted by Don Baccus on
Something else that would be nice would be to hook it up to the db agnostic search we have nowadays. It's easy to do ...

From the bug report Torben mentioned it looks as though there's a fair number of issues that are just related to the toolkit moving and leaving ecommerce behind...

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8: Re: ecommerce (response to 4)
Posted by Torben Brosten on
Mark,

Yes, the deprecated procs are part of core. Using 5.3 *should* be the fastest path for testing in 5.3, but you might want to have a 5.1 available to refer to, since the deprecated functions may not be documented in 5.3 and the changes are not necessarily simple substitution.

cheers,

Torben