Forum OpenACS Development: OpenACS Development Question regarding ecommerce

I am writing an invoicing module for a project where invoices are generated, payments are made on a recurring basis.  This requires the generation of an invoice with certain detail lines, which will have a due-date of 10-30 days, and, if payment information is on file currently, on the duedate, the invoice is paid with the existing payment info.

Granted, some of the functionality is already written in the E-Commerce modules, some customization would be needed.  Of course I need to write a gateway module to work with my existing credit card gateway providers and also a modification to submit invoices through paypal.

However, ecommerce doesn't really seem to be up to 5.1 standards and doesn't seem to be really close to what I need to do.  Some of the foundations are there, however, it appears that ecommerce duplicates user info.  I was thinking that using user-preferences would probably be better for storing some of the information in my case.

Am I better off trying to upgrade portions of ecommerce and customize?  or is this one of those times where I would be better off writing a package to do what I need?

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
My recommendation would be to enhance ecommerce and team up with the James, Talli and Thomas, talking about this at https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=185441
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Posted by Brad Duell on
I would suggest upgrading ecommerce (and posting upgrades to bugtracker) as well as customizing.

The whole registration section of ecommerce can be removed fairly easily (for instance, see https://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/com/ecommerce/bug?bug%5fnumber=1072).

We've also disgarded the ecommerce user classes to use the groups in the toolkit as well (by changing the two tables to views with the same name).

The nice thing about ecommerce (and other existing packages) is that they are highly customizable and you don't have to start from scratch (like, for one project I stripped the ecommerce checkout to 3 steps).  I think it's the easier route for you to go.

Good luck!