Forum OpenACS Q&A: Akopia's Interchange

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Posted by jim Zamboob on
Is anyone familiar with Akopia's Interchange (http://www.akopia.com)? It's a open source ecommerce package that I heard is fantastic. Akopia was just acquired by RedHat.

Anybody have any experience with it? Considering that the ACS 4.X is currently ecommerce-less, could this be an alternative?

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Posted by Adam Farkas on
I've installed it on a few boxen. It's useful if you run a traditional B2C, catalog-based business, and just want to get your biz online fast.

It has the ability to up & cross-sell, and some degree of crude "personalization" based on shopping behavior.

It can use PG or Oracle, so transaction support is there.

It can also connect to the [bankrupt] Cybercash and Verisign.

Download RedHat 7 & give it a try. It took me about 10 minutes total to get their demo store up and running, last time I tried.

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Posted by Roberto Mello on
AFAIK, InterChange is based on MiniVend (an open source shopping cart project) and is written for mod_perl.

My feeling is that OpenACS 4.x won't be ecommerce-less for too long after the core is released.

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Posted by jim Zamboob on
Interchange is based on MiniVend and Tallyman.

I only ask because while ACS 4.X ought to include ecommerce, right now it doesn't.  Since the ecommerce code was frozen at aD (and lord knows they could use some ecommerce right about now) is it complete enough to wait until it's available in OpenACS?  AFAIK, OpenACS port was supposed to be out by now, too...

So I'm wondering what's more reasonable -- wait for the ecommerce module or just start using some other open source product?

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Posted by Roberto Mello on
Well, that depends on your needs. There's always OpenACS 3.2.x Ecommerce module, which works well for many high-profile sites on the net.
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Posted by Walter McGinnis on

I'm working with Furfly to finish a port of the ACS 3x version of ecommerce to an ACS 4x package. We are almost ready to release an alpha version to the community.

See this thread at web/db forum for details:

http://www.arsdigita.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg%5fid=000b5M&topic%5fid=web%2fdb&topic=

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7: E-commerce alpha released (response to 1)
Posted by Janine Ohmer on
furfly's port of the 3.x e-commerce module to 4.x has been
released, wahoo!

It's definitely an alpha, not all the details are done, but overall it's
in pretty good shape.

You need two apms for this, one for e-commerce itself and one
called acs-geo-tables, which provides the geographical info
e-commerce needs.  We decided to do this instead of using
acs-references, which has an uncertain future, or acs-places
which carries a lot of overhead[1].

The files can be found at http://www.furfly.net/downloads, or you
can point the APM at
http://www.furfly.net/downloads/acs-geo-tables-4.1a.apm and
http://www.furfly.net/downloads/ecomerce-4.1a.apm.  They may
eventually make it into ArsDigita's ACS repository too, but I had
some upload difficulties so they're not submitted yet (their
system claimed it could not gunzip my files, for some reason).

We did this port as part of a client project;  credit for the work
goes to Jerry Asher and Walter McGinnis.  We don't "own" this
port;  we will contribute fixes to it as we have them, and we
encourage others to do the same.  The source will be under CVS
control at openacs.org when the OpenACS 4 CVS tree is ready,
and all changes should be run through the OpenACS project.

[1]
http://www.arsdigita.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg%5fid=
000aNO&topic%5fid=935&topic=ACS%20Applications

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Posted by Eve Andersson on
Yay -- Jerry, Walter, and Janine!  You guys rock!!
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Posted by Brad Chick on
Ecommerce Questions:

  1. Will the port work for ACS/Oracle installations? Or just PG?
  2. And where in the world is aD on this? Why don't they have any info on their web site about the ecommerce stff?
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Posted by Don Baccus on
It's currently Oracle-only.

When it is fully ported to OpenACS 4.x, it will run under either RDBMS.

Furfly did the ACS Classic [oracle] 3.x -> ACS Classic 4.x.

Civilution people and Walter McGinnis (who contracted with furfly for the 3.x->4.x step) will do the ACS Classic 4.x -> OpenACS 4.x (oracle and PG).

Furfly and Civilution both have a vested interest in seeing this happen, as they both build custom websites for clients.