I'm hoping some of you who have a lot of experience with Satchmo will have some advice for me. I've been working with Satchmo for a few years now, have a few stores running off it, and now am trying to rebuild one of those stores to greatly improve how it works and its manageability for administrators.
Here's the store in a nutshell: downloadable media (entirely), where each product has two variations (SD & HD) where one variation (HD) increases the base cost of the product. Each variation has one or more files attached to it (different video formats usually), which the customer will have access to download upon completing his/her purchase. That's pretty much it. And after a year of wrestling with Satchmo, I feel I'm no closer to a solution. I'm running trunk (Django + Satchmo), by the way. Just to set the tone here, I love a lot about Satchmo, have a huge appreciation for the hard work by Bruce, Chris, and others, and understand it can't do everything for everyone. That said, here are what I think are my core frustrations: 1. Downloadable products seem to be a second-class citizen in Satchmo, which seems weird to me given the age we're in. There's the field 'Number in Stock' which in my experience has to be set to some high number (so it doesn't reach 0 after a few purchases) to make sure downloadable products can actually be sold. 2. Product variations are quite complex and slow everything down. Having to triple my product inventory by creating 3x of each product (base product, plus two generated products for the variations) is nuts. It's going to slow down every operation and it confuses my clients. Additionally, the variation manager and 'add variation' views (as noted in another discussion awhile ago) operate inconsistently and at times don't work at all (I believe javascript is required oddly enough) and don't supply any error messages. Every active product shows up on the site, meaning every one of those product variations shows up. So I have to add my own listeners to strip out variations from queries. This piles on complexity and increases server & db processing time. 3. I think the idea behind Satchmo is for it be flexible, but my experience has been that it has a fairly rigid use-case in mind and straying away from that just doesn't work well. (I suppose this is the core underlying issue). 4. I've tried to reverse engineer the shopping cart to figure out how to add my own product variation that works without having to have unique Product instances for everything, but it's been fruitless so far. I fear my head may explode. Bottom line: I feel forced into using the ConfigurableProduct approach even though it's not what I want at all. I'm not selling t-shirts or computers. And I can't use the downloadable product module because it doesn't fit with the types of products my clients are offering (no variations). What would you do if this were your project? How would you configure Satchmo or design a custom product module? I'm sure (or at least very hopeful) that I'm doing it the "wrong" way and I've missed some important details. Is there an advanced guide to the cart and how to design a custom product module with one variation for every product so it works with the cart? Many, many thanks in advance for your comments & suggestions! Dave -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Satchmo users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/satchmo-users?hl=en.
