Hi All,
We've decided that we're going to make an informal announcement today about our new e-commerce package built specifically for TYPOLight. It is called "Isotope e-commerce". This package will be offered as an open source core package with some great features that we're excited about and are sure you will be pleased with.
We're going to open up a limited beta on our package in September, and right now we're shooting for Mid-September to do it. If you are interested in participating in our beta, you can email/pm me here, although we will probably have an official beta signup page elsewhere soon.
Overview
We've taken a radically different approach as compared to typical ecommerce packages. We decided that, in order to get a true seamless integration, we needed to a) NOT reinvent the wheel in any way possible and b) leverage TYPOlight's great features that we love so much to create a new hybrid CMS/E-commerce solution. I don't have time to go deeper into it now, so let me just itemize some of the features we're going to give you in the package and explain briefly why we did it that way. :)
Some Examples
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Products are related to pages which function as categories. This is one major change that we think makes great sense. So, you are wondering - Why did we do this? Because by associating products with pages, we can utilize all the great features of pages and still have a functioning category. As a bonus, the product listing module can be placed in a layout only once and then that layout can be associated with any page and voila! You have a product listing specific to that page (category). Of course, this also means that you can utilize standard navigation modules. We didn't want to reinvent the wheel on that as you can imagine.
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No additional knowledge/new processes to learn. If you know TYPOlight, then you already know Isotope e-commerce. Products are listed using a product listing module, Product details are read using a product reader module, just like the News Module
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Emphasis on flexibility. One thing we never liked in all the other packages we have ever used is that making basic changes - calling in extra information, or creating configurable products - was just too hard. It often required some form of code adjustment to add a new product option, for example. We've done everything we can to reduce the necessity for this type of work. Handling additional product information or creating product options is very simple, in short.
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Emphasis on image and media asset management - We've done a lot of work utilizing GD library for image management - auto scaling and caching, for example, is a feature.
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Designer-friendly templates. Again, TYPOlight makes templating relatively easy. We've made sure that our skeleton templates, almost completely div-based, also follow the example set by TYPOlight.
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Developer-friendly framework. We're in the process of adding hooks where useful to allow other developers to be able to integrate their own work without modifying our core code.. Again this powerful concept came from TYPOlight.
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Emphasis on TYPOlight coding conventions. We've coded in the same style as the core framework of TYPOlight.
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International currency and language support. We've made sure that we enabled currency and language to be handled correctly both in the front end and back end.
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Shipping and Payment module management. So far, we've developed payment gateways for Authorize.net, Swiss Postfinance, and basic Paypal. Paypal pro to come as soon as someone offers to do it, or else we get around to it. These gateways are managed in the back end. In addition, options for each of these module types can be restricted by member group, by country, and soon by region and even postal code. The same goes with shipping module management, and our stock shipping module is
extremely flexible and intelligent, we're quite proud of how it works :cool:
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Tax class management. Not much to say except, "it's there". :D It supports even the complex regional and zip-code based tax rules of the United States (which is where we live).
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Email manager. A great module that allows you the ability to create HTML & Text emails and configure those, complete with insertTags for order & customer information. With language fallback.
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Other features - The basics - store configuration, order management, Invoice to PDF using tcpdf library, a standard checkout module, etc. etc. etc.
While I do not have actual access to our package to offer you at this time (sorry!!!), I can point you in the direction of two shops that are running live early beta prototypes of our package. The earliest is at
http://www.kolbo.com and our most recent and much more developed is running at
http://www.cdss.org.
I know I've forgotten many things here, but we will be producing some webcasts to talk more about Isotope e-commerce, our approach and the features it has in the near future. Our team consists of Blair Winans, "winanscreative" on the forum, me, (Fred Bliss), and our other contributor has been Andreas Schempp, and he's done more for this package than he would like to receive credit for! :)
Note
Please direct all questions to me or Blair "winanscreative" on the forums. This project has been sponsored by Winans Creative, which also happens to be where I work as well.
Look forward to hearing from all of you!
Fred
