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Author
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Message
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Bruce Morrison
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Tuesday 23 March 2004 7:27:27 pm
I'm are currently looking at adding an e-commerce facility to an existing eZ Publish site. The first port of call was to look at the shop module that is part of eZ Publish. I found it pretty difficult to find any documentation and the online demo seems to fail the checkout process. Not greats signs. I'm all for wading through the code and examples but I'm not sure it is worth my (or the clients) time especially when there are existing open source e-commerce products out there that seem more mature, provide documentation, have many more features and seem to work pretty much out of the box. (Very happy with the ez Publish CMS features :) What advantages are there to using the eZ Publish shop? The only two I can see are closer integration into an existing site, so there is a common set of templates, links to product in rest of the site etc, and an integration of user accounts with any existing login for forums etc. Is anyone using the eZ Publish (V3.x) shop? If so got any experiences you want to share?
Cheers
Bruce
My Blog: http://www.stuffandcontent.com/
Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/brucemorrison
Consolidated eZ Publish Feed : http://friendfeed.com/rooms/ez-publish
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Paul Forsyth
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Wednesday 24 March 2004 1:05:49 am
The shop module does not include a payment engine, which is probably why your test failed. We have several e-commerce sites now running eZ publish, using our Worldpay extension (in the contrib area) without problems. That extension can likely be adapted for other payment engines - they are pretty similar. For us the biggest benefit is customers can work with products in the same way they can for other objects like articles. Its that simple. paul
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Tore Skobba
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Wednesday 24 March 2004 1:23:14 am
Hi I am also very interested in information about EZ shop and the usage of it. The totally lack of documentation for the webshop have led me to consider eventually making my own webshop extension (maybee based on SOAP). Furthermore I have been searching for open source web shop solutions, but have failed to find anyone that seems flexible, do you have any tips on that?
Cheers
Tore
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Alex Jones
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Wednesday 24 March 2004 7:22:30 am
While I love eZ publish, I am not happy with its commerce capabilities. Specifically, trying to sell semi-complex products. There are some long threads discussing product options, so I won't get into it again. ;) From what I have heard, and as Paul has posted above, many people do like it though. I guess it just isn't for us. That said, I have been thinking of a separate method
of developing our site that might provide us the flexibility we need, but I'm not sure... I have also been looking into separate shopping carts (just the cart, not a full e-commerce implementation like OSCommerce which also acts as a CMS). I found a program that looks to be a pretty solid Perl script that allows me to post everything to it via POST/GET which allows me to use eZ publish for the CMS. I would prefer to not deal with totally separate systems, scripts and languages, but... well I may have to. I hope the folks at eZ systems will focus more attention on providing flexibility and power in the commerce portions of the site in the future. Alex
Alex
[ bald_technologist on the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net): #eZpublish ]
<i>When in doubt, clear the cache.</i>
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Paul Forsyth
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Wednesday 24 March 2004 7:40:45 am
Our satisfaction with the shop module is limited. It works for us and we have enough technical knowledge to implement what we need, but the shop module should do more. IMHO, the administration interface should do far more than just list orders and vat types, and there should be a payment gateway template given with eZ publish. While it is easy to create a Product class and have many such objects in the system it is not clear how to organise and administrate these objects in a medium to large sized e-commerce site (Amazon anyone?). However, at its simplest eZ publish is a library. It is a little unfair to ask for complete working implementations of complicated sites. What we really need are good, in depth tutorials, case studies, extensions, and so on. It would make for a good workshop at this summers conference. paul
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Tony Wood
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Wednesday 24 March 2004 8:13:35 am
I think the issue with commerce sites is that although they all do the same thing, choose-basket-buy. Each company has its own requirements for how the customer views the information and how the fulfilment of the order is handled packaging etc.
It is true there are various other packages out there that handle most shop features, intershop, actinic etc. These are great but the problem comes with integration. You generally want a single uninterupt (both deisgn and process) method for updating articles and products. So you need to choose what your main requirement is and choose a package that fulfils that need.
That said I think that eZ has all you need from a shoping cart, but, there are many areas that need improvment.
I agree with Paul, a workshop at the conference would be good to discuss these points. -- tony
Tony Wood : twitter.com/tonywood
Vision with Technology
Experts in eZ Publish consulting & development
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Bruce Morrison
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Wednesday 24 March 2004 3:26:40 pm
Thanks for all the input. Paul - I'm refering to the online demo supplied by ezPublish at http://demo.ezpublish.no/shop/ when ever I try to check out I get the following
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: accountinformation() in /www/demo.ezpublish.no/www2/kernel/classes/ezorder.php on line 540
Fatal error: eZ publish did not finish it's request The execution of eZ publish was abruptly ended, the debug output is present below. Paul - Can you give URLs of the sites you have developed? I'm tring to get a feel for what is possible with the shop module. I realise that I would have to create a checkout workflow. I'm keen to use it for one of our projects but would have trouble justifing it's use if it took longer than an existing OS shop app to install, configure and intergrate. Tore - we are currently looking at OSCommerce and Zen-Cart (Zen-Cart appears to be a fork/reworking of OSC) Alex - What is the perl program you are looking at? Tony - You are 110% correct! We have 2 clients looking at implementing shops. One as I mentioned has an existing eZ Publish site and the shop will not be the main focus - this is where we are having the delemia. The other will have the shop as the main focus and while it would be good to utilise our eZ Publish experience, a specialised shop application is much more suited to the job.
Cheers
Bruce
My Blog: http://www.stuffandcontent.com/
Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/brucemorrison
Consolidated eZ Publish Feed : http://friendfeed.com/rooms/ez-publish
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Alex Jones
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Thursday 25 March 2004 7:09:11 am
Bruce, I don't think it's appropriate for me to post a link to the other cart as it does compete (at least in a small way with eZ publish). If you want me to give you some info, post your e-mail address here, or drop me an e-mail at 'alexj' at 'agrussell.com' and I'll send you the info and my impressions on the package. Alternately you can pop onto #eZpublish on IRC. I aim to be logged in most of the day (U.S. Central) and bald_technologist (well, it cuts off the 't'...sigh ;). Alex
Alex
[ bald_technologist on the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net): #eZpublish ]
<i>When in doubt, clear the cache.</i>
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