Forum OpenACS Q&A: Sysadmin magizine is looking for a low budget ecommerce article for Feb 2003

They want a proposal  by 1 Sept and the article by 1 Oct for the Feb
2003 issue. Here is the item:

Studies in low budget e-commerce.

I have never done any e-commerce so all I can do is put it out there.

I forgot the contact info:

Rickky Endsley
Sys Admin
1601 W. 23rd St., Suite 200
Lawrence KS, 66046
voice: (785) 838-7555
fax: (785) 841-2047
email: rendsley@cmp.com

Hi Marc,

We have done semizone.com and "Education on Demand" is a customization of ecommerce of ACS 3.4.x.  If anybody in OACS wants to promote or market? Me and Deds is willing answer stuff.

Malte?  Simon?  Maybe this is a good way to make OACS visible.

Anybody else did an ecommerce from OACS or ACS?  Hamilton and Roel is also doing 2 sites that uses OACS 4.5

I built freedomfeeder.com and integro-llc.com, both ecommerce+ sites based on OpenACS 3.2x. Unfortunately both sites are gone now. The freedomfeeder solution was a great success; due to increased international sales and reduced overhead.

I am presently working on OACS4.5 solutions for williamskitchen.com, wmsdist.com, and completestopfireworks.com but we are in early stages of design (a.k.a. lots of meetings and arm waving); no delivery dates have been set. All three will be ecommerce enabled.

Not sure if that helps, but the idea of OACS promotion (beyond what I preach) would be a big help. Perhaps we should have a place to post our success stories... a home for posting news, web site grand openings, mini-case studies, industry events, etc. Not unlike the web site portfolio I present to my prospects, but for the OpenACS Community. There is great power in numbers, and several thousand downloads must have resulted in some pretty exciting works.

Also, what is stopping us from leveraging off of the original ACS installations? At the very least to say, "ACS, the Oracle version and OACS the open-source (Postgresql) version are the foundations for all these great web sites: {insert names here}." Hey, for that matter, what harm is there in saying OACS has its origin from the very same core that RedHat uses for their CCM Community solution. (offtopic: does anyone know how much RedHat charges for a CCM solution, btw?)

Successful marketing and promotion of OACS puts bread on my table... let me know how I can help. Oh, and if someone is starting a donation pit for OACS marketing/promo, let me know where to send the check? /nb

Ummm one more idea... in line with the "success stories" above, we might have a "press" section on OACS that lists key info, overviews, dates, history of, contacts, releases, etc. to support the press's need for details. Yea, I know, more work. /nb

We'll soon have a "evangalism" forum for marketing/promotion discussions (I've been too busy/lazy to follow through and post our suggested names and descriptions for the new forums but will soon).

So we're not ignoring this crucial area, Nathan ...

The ideas you mention are all good ones ... there's work underway to finish up and launch our new OpenACS 4.x-based openacs.org website.  After that's done there should be a lot more willingness to add new sections, etc.  No one's been very motivated to add to the 3.2.5-based site because we've known we'll scrap it and move to the new site.

I am interested in writing the article. If people sends me info about their success stories, I will compile them and write to the editor.
Also, for anyone interested in other outlets, or other OpenACS/Tcl/SQL related articles, you might want to contact Cameron Laird. He has a lot of media connections, and can help get articles placed, etc.