Forum OpenACS Development: Ecommerce package

1: Ecommerce package

Posted by alessio costantini on 12/26/05 08:49 PM

We recently discovered OpenAcs and we need to test it in a commercial environment to build a community/ecommerce site.
We've installed OACS 5.2 on OpenBSD 3.8 and everything seems to be ok, but there are few packages for 5.2 on the repository.
OACS 5.15 doesn't want to work (probably because we use postgresql 8.03 on our server).
We would like to test the Ecommerce package, so is there someone who could tell us if there is a plan to release Ecommerce for 5.2 ?

Thank You everybody.

2: Re: Ecommerce package (response to 1)

Posted by Alfred Essa on 12/26/05 09:28 PM

Alession, Thank you for the question. We could all use an update on the status of the ecommerce package.

I know Caroline Meeks' company, Solution Grove, has had recent experience at a couple of customer of sites and had been planning to release it. Perhaps we will hear from her.

3: Re: Ecommerce package (response to 1)

Posted by Tracy Adams on 12/26/05 11:13 PM

I recently oversaw the development an ecommerce site (actually a merge of dotlrn and ecommerce) for the Boston Museum of Science. We developed against OpenACS CVS so the changes have been committed.

The site launched last August, so that was before the OpenACS 5.2 was officially released, but we were using 5.2 branch ecommerce (ie - a close predecessor of the release) so it should be pretty close to being compatible if it is not already so.

Carl also just told me on AIM that he plans to move MGH from this version (or close) up to the official 5.2 in Jan.

4: Re: Ecommerce package (response to 1)

Posted by Torben Brosten on 12/27/05 05:42 AM

ecommerce oacs-5-1 branch has many additions that have not yet been added to oacs-5-2 branch.

To update the oacs-5-2 branch of ecommerce, I suggest this approach:

Determine the differences between the oacs-5-1 branch bewteen 2005 Feb 24 and now, then manually apply the changes to the oacs-5-2 branch.

I back ported most of the changes in the oacs-5-2 branch to oacs-5-1, but did not forward port any changes, because there were massive changes going into dotlrn-ecommerce, and I did not want to mess up any ongoing development that depended on ecommerce.

Hope this helps,

Torben

5: Re: Ecommerce package (response to 1)

Posted by Caroline Meeks on 12/27/05 04:00 PM

Hi Alessio,

Solution Grove launched two sites this fall on prerelease 5.2 that used "dotlrn-eccomerce" which depends on the APIs from eccomrece and uses some of the pages. Both systems are running postgres 7.4.x.

We committed fixes that added noquote to the adp pages for the eccomerce pages we used but there are probably other adp pages that still have that issue.

We used postgres 7.4.8 and our guess is you may have to fix some queries to use postgres 8.

6: Re: Ecommerce package (response to 1)

Posted by Joe Cooper on 12/28/05 06:58 AM

Hi Alessio,

I deployed ecommerce, along with a bunch of other packages, in July of this year with OACS 5.1.5. I've got the 5.1.5 (actually 5.05, I think) version running on my devel server with 5.2.0, and after a couple of small deprecated function fixes, it works OK. Torben and I each have a bug open about these deprecated functions...but Torben's deprecated functions don't seem to be causing my instance any pain. But then, it is not yet in production use.

I'll take this opportunity to let you know something that I didn't know coming in: ecommerce is not a complete app, as installed from the package repository. It's more of a kit. And some of the pieces don't actually work. But, I (a complete tcl, aolserver, and oacs newbie) was able to get a pretty full-featured store (plus all of the other apps and web design--but ecommerce took the majority of the time) up and running in about three months of evenings and weekends, so it's not all that tough to do. 😉

In short, I suspect you can grab the ecommerce code from CVS and install it into your OACS without two much pain. I have not touched the CVS version--I hadn't yet figured out the development/release process of OACS when I was building my store--but I suspect it is probably no farther from working than the 5.05 release.