Hi,
I am reading around about shopping carts, most of the posts talk about integrating with other 3rd party packages.
How about building the shopping cart from scratch, say we are talking about a simple shopping cart. Do the concepts of building a shopping cart outside Umbraco, still valid for Umbraco? For instance, if I already have built a shopping cart with MVC website, can this be imported and re-written with Umbraco APIs?
In all cases, I appreciate recommending some shopping cart packages to use with Umbraco.
Hi Bilal, there is no techical reason why you cannot integrate an existing 'pure' MVC project with Umbraco - Umbraco MVC simply extends the standard .Net MVC framework so you have access to the Umbraco context in your controllers (so you can get to your content and avail of the Umbraco API's etc). It would not be hard for instance, to add a Partial View containing all your cart stuff to an existing Umbraco view. Saying that, where your project will be challenging will be in the backoffice, for instance, if you want to add custom sections to manage orders, products and customers.
If that's not an issue, go for it - try integrating your existing cart, but keep your shop logic separate from Umbraco. If you want a tighter integration, I would encourage you to look at Merchello, which is a new open source eCommerce system for Umbraco 7. The Merchello team are great guys and they have an example store (called Bazaar) you can install and play with. Because it is OSS you can extend it to fit your needs exactly.
Thanks Barry for your response. In fact, I am still new to Umbraco, I am trying to find my way around to feel relaxed in extending it for my needs.
For instance, I went through all the Umbraco.tv videos, I added a custom Partial View where by I was able to access Umbraco content using its API. However, I would like to take this one step further and learn how to extend backoffice with custom sections/tree, how to handle the views inside backoffice etc.
Given the above I believe I would have gained all the knowledge needed to customize/extend Umbraco as if it was a normal MVC application.
I will be looking at Merchello of course. Also, I appreciate if you can point me to resources on extending backoffice. I've seen several articles online but most of them are incomplete and a waste of time.
Hey Bilal, I checked on Umbraco TV and although it looks like they have stubbed out a section for extending Umbraco, it doesnt seem there are any videos in there yet.
Develop a Shopping Cart in Umbraco 7
Hi, I am reading around about shopping carts, most of the posts talk about integrating with other 3rd party packages.
How about building the shopping cart from scratch, say we are talking about a simple shopping cart. Do the concepts of building a shopping cart outside Umbraco, still valid for Umbraco? For instance, if I already have built a shopping cart with MVC website, can this be imported and re-written with Umbraco APIs?
In all cases, I appreciate recommending some shopping cart packages to use with Umbraco.
Thanks
Hi Bilal, there is no techical reason why you cannot integrate an existing 'pure' MVC project with Umbraco - Umbraco MVC simply extends the standard .Net MVC framework so you have access to the Umbraco context in your controllers (so you can get to your content and avail of the Umbraco API's etc). It would not be hard for instance, to add a Partial View containing all your cart stuff to an existing Umbraco view. Saying that, where your project will be challenging will be in the backoffice, for instance, if you want to add custom sections to manage orders, products and customers.
If that's not an issue, go for it - try integrating your existing cart, but keep your shop logic separate from Umbraco. If you want a tighter integration, I would encourage you to look at Merchello, which is a new open source eCommerce system for Umbraco 7. The Merchello team are great guys and they have an example store (called Bazaar) you can install and play with. Because it is OSS you can extend it to fit your needs exactly.
Thanks Barry for your response. In fact, I am still new to Umbraco, I am trying to find my way around to feel relaxed in extending it for my needs. For instance, I went through all the Umbraco.tv videos, I added a custom Partial View where by I was able to access Umbraco content using its API. However, I would like to take this one step further and learn how to extend backoffice with custom sections/tree, how to handle the views inside backoffice etc.
Given the above I believe I would have gained all the knowledge needed to customize/extend Umbraco as if it was a normal MVC application.
I will be looking at Merchello of course. Also, I appreciate if you can point me to resources on extending backoffice. I've seen several articles online but most of them are incomplete and a waste of time.
Much appreciated.
Best regards Bilal Haidar
Hey Bilal, I checked on Umbraco TV and although it looks like they have stubbed out a section for extending Umbraco, it doesnt seem there are any videos in there yet.
Try this for a starting point - http://www.enkelmedia.se/blogg/2013/11/22/creating-custom-sections-in-umbraco-7-part-1.aspx
Thanks Barry!
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