Sounds good, no I mean sounds very good! I am new to using Farcry, and see a great product and even greater potential due to the ease of extending what is in the core package whilst keeping within the overall design of Farcry.
Your message is very timely as I am starting a project that will require an ecommerce component, as well as others including a forum.
I would be very interested in finding out more, for the above reason, but also to see how others develop new components to fit in with core Farcry.
Why do you create a node for each product? What are the benefits of this?
I like the idea of re-using (with modifications of course) the pet market CFC's.
Do I read you correct, that you have two Farcry apps, a CMS and an Ecommerce one? I would have thpught that it would be better to have one app, and therefore allow the CMS entries to reference and be referenced by the ecommerce ones.
All the best for this project, is there an online version to have a look at? Also please do let me know if you would consider letting me be a tester for this project.
Chris.
Michael Sammut wrote:
Hi All,
I have been busy in our company making a FarCry Ecommerce component (When ready I will send it on out for ya'all). In any case I wanted to get some thoughts.
FarCry is very flexible for ecommerce. Our approach for product display is driven, at this point, by client need. Basically, in the Home Tree we create a folder called ecommerce. In that folder we can then create any number of categories (Necklaces, Bracelets, Earrings, etc). And once again within any one of those folders we create a node for each product.
For product entry, in each folder we supply the system with 2 custom types -- dmProduct (only one) and dmOption (as many as needed). dmProduct holds the master product information (metakeywords, description, images, teaser, recommended products, etc.). dmOption (SKU, pricing, inventory, specific images, etc) holds one or as many deviations/SKUs of the product. If there is only one option, it is automatically considered the main SKU for the master product. If there is more than one option, then looping over the aObjectIds enables us to display the product page and associated options in any number of ways. When we enter in dmProduct, there is no option to put a title in, as we are reading the node title for the product, thus the dmProduct has a default title of "Master Product Information" (Side note: I guess I could have not done this if I took the time to attempt to define a custom dmNavigation). This creates a visual distinction in folders between master and optional product info (I did not want to mess with the core and create new icons for the tree and this turns out to be quite intuitive for our client).
A cool thing I have noticed is that we can loop around folders and types to do related pull downs. For instance, if you choose blue from the color pull down, have the corresponding size pulldown only show what is in stock for that color.
One thing I had to do is copy the Navajo display code and alter it into a custom tag for the ecommerce (did not want to mess with the core). Basically, I updated the display to no longer look at the first object in a node, but rather if the parent at level 2 is called "ecommerce" to grab the dmProduct -- in other words the master product. This was simply adding a condition tot he www/index.cfm to call in the alternate display type when in the ecommerce node.
Handling Tax (zip or state), Shipping (Zones, ranges, etc), Discounts (coupon, dates, dollar & percentage), Vendors, Gift Wrapping, etc, are all done through very straight forward custom types. The routines for the cart, customers, etc, are based upon some CFC's from Macromedia's Pet Market along with some other code stuff we put together. A really good thing is that the FUs will make the site very indexable vs. so many solution where the URLs look like a science experiment.
The site we are currently working on has the pure CMS working alongside the ecom quite well. Once we get it done in this infant stage we will decide on what to expand upon and what to make better.
Any ideas or thoughts?
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MXDU2004 + Macromedia DevCon AsiaPac + Sydney, Australia http://www.mxdu.com/ + 24-25 February, 2004
