E-Commerce solution's?

**shmuelios** · 07/16/2009, 13:02

Hey,

I only know of typolight-webshop.de (below) and don't know if it will be the best one out there?

Here is that fruitMEDIA one suggested in the old forum (translated)
www.typolight-webshop.de (english)

Demo site FE (translated - may need to switch to original for cart stuff)
demo.typolight-webshop.de (english)
Demo site BE
http://demo.typolight-webshop.de/typolight/ still a bit buggy in areas
user/pass: administrator

If anyone has more info on what is happening with this one and other systems please let us know?

I've used Catalog\CatalogExt and see that as an amazing extension! have people found ways to integrate/bridge e-commerce to this?

Thanks,
Sam

**acenes** · 07/16/2009, 17:24

Originally Posted by shmuelios

I've used Catalog\CatalogExt and see that as an amazing extension! have people found ways to integrate/bridge e-commerce to this?

For this purpose the chShop extension could be used (but it is still beta). Unfortunately there is no english translation yet, but from the description it seems able to handle catalog entries as well as plain articles:

http://www.typolight.org/erweiterung...ew/chShop.html

**winanscreative** · 07/19/2009, 16:01

Hi Sam-

We're working on a totally integrated solution right now (inspired by the way Catalog works). Hopefully we will be releasing more info in the coming weeks/months, but the goal is to build a system that drops right into TL the way any other extension/module would and take advantage of the framework and flexibility.

We originally experimented with some "bridged" carts for TL but quickly realized that total integration with the CMS is definitely the best way to go.

There's obviously some challenges to be met, and we have a great team that has been working on it for a few months now, but hopefully soon we will be seeking some input from other developers to really make this as polished as it can be and release a beta to everyone before the end of the year.

The goal is to work the same way that makes TL beautiful — total flexibility in how you want to set up your site/store, and making it developer and designer friendly.

We'll try and keep posting updates here in the forum when we can to keep you updated... :D

Blair

**shmuelios** · 07/20/2009, 16:40

Thanks acenes chShop looks like a promising system although very hard to figure out without translation.

Hey Blair, look forward to seeing what you guys come up with! Do you have a feature set or how your pricing it?

Thanks,

Sam

**winanscreative** · 07/23/2009, 02:15

Hey Sam-

We're doing a lot of work with different TL developers so it will be hopefully be released to the community. We're hoping to end up with some future revenue on different quick-configurations (SQL files that can get certain types of stores set up in a flash), templates, and extra features such as a product data import/export tool, but for the most part it's going to be really easy to develop for since it's built on the TL framework, totally customizable within the CMS like any TL module, and really a great solution for a variety of stores. We basically set out to build a toolset that we could use on all our client sites that would make life easier for us, and it has kind of evolved from there.

As far as a feature set, we're concentrating on the basics now (product listing/reader, filters/search, checkout process, order management, shipping and payment modules, address book management, cart management, email notifications, configurable product options & attributes... whew!) Plus some other fun stuff like auto-thumbnailing of images, audio/video integration, insert tags for products (so that they can be dropped anywhere) and various other tidbits. It's a lot to manage, and there's still a lot of polishing to do, but we do have a few sites running in various stages of development.

We're excited about it and excited to show everyone what we've been up to... Hopefully soon!

**wal5hy** · 08/04/2009, 18:04

Hi Blair,

your e-commerce application for Typolight looks really interesting. I have a client with a requirement to use existing database tables for their product/e-commerce pages on their website. They already have created/maintain a product database and the easiest solution (without needing to duplicate work) would be to mirror the database out to a remote webserver and reuse the existing data.

Would your e-commerce system support existing tables to populate the product information?

thanks looking forward to the response.

Luke-

**winanscreative** · 08/04/2009, 18:26

Hey Luke-

I take it that you mean they have a local database (in-house) that they have built and developed themselves (such as in a point-of-sale system), and they need a way to feed it online.

If that is the case, it all depends on a) what type of database they are running locally (and on what type of system), b) whether there is a way to easily export/push/sync it up with the online one. I am sure that if you can solve that then getting the system to match table fields with the online DB would be easy.

Unfortunately there are a lot of factors involved when you are talking syncing a local computer database with an online one, and there needs to be a "bridge". One of our clients is actually running Filemaker locally as their POS and is doing just what you describe with a basic version of our system.

Then, of course, you also need to push the data (orders, inventory, etc) back to the local system (or have it set up to remotely retrieve it).

So, long story short, it is always possible... It's just probably a custom job for each type of DB in order to build the "bridge", and likely the work would need to happen on the desktop side depending on what type of local DB app they were running...

Happy to discuss further... Let me know if this is what you meant...

**wal5hy** · 08/04/2009, 20:16

Hi Blair,

thanks, yes that's pretty much what i mean. The bridging/syncing part I haven't worked out yet (in the short term the requirement is only for a one way bridge, the client is happy to use the Ecommerce website back end for managing orders), but once i get the bridge working I was hoping that your system would be able to use the existing data to populate the product page, and that seems to be the case judging from your swift response. thanks
Luke

**winanscreative** · 08/04/2009, 20:42

Hi Luke-

Once the bridge is there you would simply use it to populate the web DB with the product data. You may need the bridging script to do some formatting of the data to fit the system, since some fields would need to be serialized, etc, but nothing terribly complicated.

What we plan to have in the future is a data-migration tool that may help in getting some of those things set up, but that's a little ways out.

We looked at some other packages out there that really made their table structure unwieldy (namely Magento), so one of our goals here was to keep it simple in order to facilitate data migration and syncing like it sounds like you would need...

Hope that helps! We'll have plenty more info as we get to Beta...

Blair