I am looking into the prospect of using uCommerce for the purpose of managing a large range of products. uCommerce provides a lot of out of the box functionality which is create because it ticks of a few boxed based upon the requirements that i have.
However, I have a few queries around extending uCommerce to suit some particular requirements. I guess my main conerns are for the following;
How hard would it be to create a wysiwyg data type for usage on products? say for simply applying html formatting to text for rendering; and also ideally for putting in images.
I need to manage information associated to Products, things like Suppliers. Is it possible to create additional sections within uCommerce for storing and managing Supplier information and then hooking a Product item to a particular Supplier item?
Is it possible to do the above in a manner that will allow me to upgrade to a newer version of uCommerce without having any issues?
I will continue to playing around with uCommerce for a while, and continue to research the product; Any advice or information that can be supplied would be greatly appreciated.
> How hard would it be to create a wysiwyg data type for usage on products? say for simply applying html formatting to text for rendering; and also ideally for putting in images.
uCommerce supports replacing the supplied admin UIs. You can find more information on what this entails in the article Extending uCommerce Admin.
> I need to manage information associated to Products, things like Suppliers. Is it possible to create additional sections within uCommerce for storing and managing Supplier information and then hooking a Product item to a particular Supplier item?
There are a couple of ways you can do this. The product information stored within uCommerce can be extended with whatever information you need. If you need a supplier for each of your product you can simply create an enum type and add all known suppliers to that.
If you need to maintain more detailed information about each supplier you can actually cheat a little bit by leveraging our product definitions and related products. What you can do is create a special product definition called "Supplier". You can then create each supplier as a product in the system in a hidden category. You then related the supplier to each product using a product relation called "Supplier".
> Is it possible to do the above in a manner that will allow me to upgrade to a newer version of uCommerce without having any issues?
Both solutions mentioned works within the uCommerce framework quite nicely so you won't have any problems upgrading to newer versions.
> I will continue to playing around with uCommerce for a while, and continue to research the product; Any advice or information that can be supplied would be greatly appreciated.
If you want additional detail on the solutions outlined above we can set up an online meeting so I can demo it for you. Shouldn't take more than 30 mins to get it going.
I will spend some more time prototyping a solution over the next few weeks; Life of a developer, so much to do, so little time to do it. The main thing that pleases me about your response is that I can make the mentioned changes without causing any issues with upgrading to newer versions, that for me was always going to be the main issue. I appreciate the offer for a quick demo; at this point I have been swapped to another project so I will have to come back to you about maybe setting something up once this other work has been completed.
uCommerce evaluation
umbraco v 4.0.4.2
uCommerce-1.0.3.2
I am looking into the prospect of using uCommerce for the purpose of managing a large range of products. uCommerce provides a lot of out of the box functionality which is create because it ticks of a few boxed based upon the requirements that i have.
However, I have a few queries around extending uCommerce to suit some particular requirements. I guess my main conerns are for the following;
Is it possible to do the above in a manner that will allow me to upgrade to a newer version of uCommerce without having any issues?
I will continue to playing around with uCommerce for a while, and continue to research the product; Any advice or information that can be supplied would be greatly appreciated.
> How hard would it be to create a wysiwyg data type for usage on products? say for simply applying html formatting to text for rendering; and also ideally for putting in images.
uCommerce supports replacing the supplied admin UIs. You can find more information on what this entails in the article Extending uCommerce Admin.
> I need to manage information associated to Products, things like Suppliers. Is it possible to create additional sections within uCommerce for storing and managing Supplier information and then hooking a Product item to a particular Supplier item?
There are a couple of ways you can do this. The product information stored within uCommerce can be extended with whatever information you need. If you need a supplier for each of your product you can simply create an enum type and add all known suppliers to that.
If you need to maintain more detailed information about each supplier you can actually cheat a little bit by leveraging our product definitions and related products. What you can do is create a special product definition called "Supplier". You can then create each supplier as a product in the system in a hidden category. You then related the supplier to each product using a product relation called "Supplier".
> Is it possible to do the above in a manner that will allow me to upgrade to a newer version of uCommerce without having any issues?
Both solutions mentioned works within the uCommerce framework quite nicely so you won't have any problems upgrading to newer versions.
> I will continue to playing around with uCommerce for a while, and continue to research the product; Any advice or information that can be supplied would be greatly appreciated.
If you want additional detail on the solutions outlined above we can set up an online meeting so I can demo it for you. Shouldn't take more than 30 mins to get it going.
Thankyou Soren for your reply.
I will spend some more time prototyping a solution over the next few weeks; Life of a developer, so much to do, so little time to do it. The main thing that pleases me about your response is that I can make the mentioned changes without causing any issues with upgrading to newer versions, that for me was always going to be the main issue. I appreciate the offer for a quick demo; at this point I have been swapped to another project so I will have to come back to you about maybe setting something up once this other work has been completed.
You're most welcome. Just let me know if you need anything.
HI Aaron,
How did you fare with your evaluation? We're here to help if you need anything.
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