Textpattern CMS support forum
You are not logged in. Register | Login | Help
- Topics: Active | Unanswered
Shopping cart
I posted most of the following in Zem’s Contact Us page about a week ago, but haven’t heard anything back. Today I started searching through this forum and found the following post by Zem from 2006-06-08 in an expired thread:
FYI: Team Textpattern are gathering requirements for an integrated e-commerce application. Something more complex and capable than a simple Paypal cart.
Anyone who’s working on a commercial project for which this might be a suitable solution, feel free to get in touch.
If only it was so easy! The “get in touch” text linked to the Contact Us page of Team Textpattern which basically says piss off and post to the “Seeking Txp Pros” forums if you are looking for help.
So here I am.
I would like to discuss with a TextPattern developer the possibility of developing a shopping cart based on TextPattern.
I have seen in the past various users working on certain aspects of the problem, particularly the administrative interface, but the last time I really paid much attention it seemed we were still a long way from a working system. I have been wondering whether things might move a lot faster if someone (me, I guess) simply stepped up and paid someone to get the job done.
I run a small company that ran an OSCommerce shopping cart for several years until January 1st of this year, when we dumped OSCommerce and went to TextPattern. OSC was simply becoming a pain in the ass to maintain, and after our customizations it was so brittle there was never any question of doing any further work with it.
We justified losing the shopping cart because we had developed a pretty good dealer channel, but almost a year into the experiment we realize we are actually losing sales by not having on-line ordering (so many of our dealers are uninterested in helping customers get a product if they don’t already have it in stock). So we want a shopping cart again. There is no way we will ever go back to OSC, and ZenCart doesn’t look like much of an improvement. Magento won’t be real until sometime next year. I love TextPattern and believe a shopping cart based on it would be ideal. I’d like to see it become a reality.
I used to be a software product manager at Cisco Systems, so I know how to write a specification. And my experience with OSC makes me almost an expert in what a small business really needs from a shopping cart. I am also bemused by a comment I saw Marc Andreesen make in November 1994 when discussing how he and his team developed the Mosaic browser: they solved the easy problems first and didn’t worry about the big problems.
I have some very specific needs which I think are relatively easy to tackle compared to an all-singing, all-dancing application. For example, all I need to do with credit card numbers is capture and checksum verify them; we process them off-line. I also don’t use Paypal, so don’t need to bother with that. Et cetera.
Is this a project in which anyone would be interested?
I look forward to hearing from you.
Best regards,
Mitch Barrie
Mesa Tactical
Offline
Re: Shopping cart
Hi Mitch,
I hear you, buddy. Like you I’ve been waiting patiently for a shopping cart function to be developed. And so far, nothing but promises. It got me thinking about how I could build one of my own.
It occurred to me that, fundamentally, all I really needed was a Session variable of an associative array of all the IDs of all “products”; and a simple tag that changes the number of that particular item that has been put in the Shopping Cart. That is, all the functionality of sorting by category, or by price or by colour or whatever, is already handled by existing functions that organise articles for output.
So, I’ve written something. It’s still in the development stages, but it seems pretty straightforward: a start_session on every page, a session-based associative array, and a function to amend the number of items for each product id.
The rest is just making it look pretty. (Oh, sure, there’s the issue of Postage & Packing, etc. But that can’t be that tough to work out.)
I’m not so sure about taking the credit card details, though. As you say, it’s pretty easy. The issue is that of security. I don’t know what the regulations are regarding passing credit card details around, but here in the UK, doing something like emailing a customer’s credit card details to yourself is a pretty quick way of losing your credit agreement. And even taking details like that online requires a SSL and whole heap of hoops to jump through to satisfy the banks that the information won’t get picked up and/or broadcast.
Anyway, if you’d like to discuss this further, please let me know.
And if anyone would like to assist, likewise make yourselves known.
John Anderson
Soaring Penguin Ltd.
Offline
Re: Shopping cart
i’ve pretty much done the same thing as spenguin except its integrated with paypal. the session/cart functionality is the easy part. adding all of the various ways merchants will want to accept their payments along with security is the pisser. this would be one plugin where you’d have to be really careful as i believe certain countries don’t actually allow you to store the cc # online in any way.
Offline
Re: Shopping cart
Thank you very much for your replies. After almost ten days of waiting for an answer I was about to escalate to the Textdrive boards. I might anyway. Has TextPattern jumped the shark? Is it already yesterday’s news? I really expected a lot more response from the developer community, and now wonder whether there is any longer much of a developer community left.
We are in the middle of our USAn Thanksgiving holiday, during which I am devoting myself to gluttony interspersed with intense physical activity (I’m climbing a small mountain tomorrow) to work off the gluttony. Today I will be processing orders we received earlier in the week, and I will try to make some time to whip up the outline of an application requirements spec. I’ll post what I have on my website and would welcome any input from the community so I can revise the spec and sharpen it up into something useful and easily achievable.
As I mentioned, I really need this thing pretty quickly, and I am concerned that a purely volunteer effort will take too long to get done. I am willing to pay one or more developers for their work (though the prospect of paying in sterling or even loonies makes me, most of whose assets are dollar denominated, gasp), but if it is more than one we will have work out exactly who does what, how things are integrated, deliverables, etc. It might be best to take many of these discussions to e-mail.
Anyway, thanks again for your interest and watch this space for a link to a preliminary spec.
Offline
#5 2007-11-24 03:24:48
- Mary
- Sock Enthusiast
- Registered: 2004-06-27
- Posts: 6,236
Re: Shopping cart
Gee, “an expired thread”. Think maybe that was a hint?
The old Team site is defunct, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t tell you to “piss off”. We stopped doing custom development as a group because there was no demand.
Alex (zem) is no longer with us, and he is unable to do custom development right now. Whether he personally contacts you or not (or has up-to-date info on his personal site) has nothing to do with us.
Hope you can find someone to create something suitable for you. That’s explicitly why we have this forum and why the old Team site directs you here.
Offline
Re: Shopping cart
Mary wrote:
Gee, “an expired thread”. Think maybe that was a hint?
Hint for what? That there is no one interested in this subject or that we aren’t allowed to discuss it?
In over ten years of on-line discussion forum use I have learned it is generally most polite to search for a discussion before starting a new thread on something that has already been discussed before. Are things different here? Would you prefer that we started new threads without conducting searches?
Just making sure, different forums have different traditions.
The old Team site is defunct, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t tell you to “piss off”. We stopped doing custom development as a group because there was no demand.
Are the individual members doing work? So far none of them have contacted me or, except for you, answered this thread. Can I take this as meaning they are already too busy or that, um, they are not actually reading this forum? You have to admit this forum is pretty moribund these days.
I’d just like to find a reliable way to reach bona fide TextPattern mavens to see if anyone is interested in doing this. Are you interested in doing this (I was about to contact you next)?
Offline
Re: Shopping cart
Hint for what? That there is no one interested in this subject or that we aren’t allowed to discuss it?
Maybe it’s just hint that the topics subject is out-of-date, think’ay?
Are the individual members doing work?
Well, have you heard about plugins, like: TextCommerce
Cheers!
Offline
Re: Shopping cart
Ah! I hadn’t heard of that plugin before, that is so awesome! Thanks for the tip Jukka :)
—paula
Offline
Re: Shopping cart
Text Commerce doesn’t seem like it is moving too fast. The last update was well over a month ago and it doesn’t have a shopping cart or check out function.
I can’t wait till you smarties come up with a solution. All I want is an integrated shopping cart that can use paypal and accept coupon codes.
Art Rogue – Fine Art Photography
Offline
Re: Shopping cart
mattmikulla wrote:
Text Commerce doesn’t seem like it is moving too fast. The last update was well over a month ago and it doesn’t have a shopping cart or check out function.
I can’t wait till you smarties come up with a solution. All I want is an integrated shopping cart that can use paypal and accept coupon codes.
if you want development sped up, then send them some $$$
Offline
Re: Shopping cart
iblastoff wrote:
if you want development sped up, then send them some $$$
That’s what I will be discussing with the developers this week. They are California-based, which is nice.
If I am paying for it, it won’t support PayPal out of the box. PayPal would like to see people like me put out of business, which is mighty unfriendly of them. But of course, we would allow PayPal support to be added later.
Last edited by redneck (2007-11-27 19:55:41)
Offline
Re: Shopping cart
Yep, so it is. As iblastoff said, if you want something, you have to do something for it. Imagine, if you want some a really hot and brain-freshing coffey, will someone just give it to you, without no charges? Do you go to the movies without buying a ticket?
Unfurnarely, you won’t be able to get everything without any work. If you aren’t able to do it by yourself, you have to make something else to do it for you – and it costs. And even the hell runs with money, ay’know. Sometimes I just wonder why people just want and never give.
Cheers!
Offline