Thanks for your reply, Chris. And thanks for the links. However, the Stack Overflow example seems to be talking about cloning and a tendency of developers to exaggerate their ability to understand the complexity of a piece of software and how long it would take them to do it. My point is not about cloning Satchmo - but trying to understand how easily extensible it is and at what point I may as well build my own solution, because the gap between what I need and what Satchmo does is too great. And, for that, you're right - I need to be more specific. So here a couple things I think I may need to do to modify Satchmo:
1. Pull out a lot of e-commerce specific clutter. I'm building (primarily) an internal order entry and tracking system. I don't need shipping addresses or postal rates or a payment gateway. 2. Add a bunch of business specific stuff: - bizarre discount rules that apply on certain days, that customers can only use once a month or once a quarter, that can only be stacked in strange ways, etc. - adding lots of additional attributes/relations to products and customers such as: upc_unit, upc_case, plu_unit, plu_case, quantity_case, is_organic, has_redemption, measure, size, require_id, category_id, location_id, producer_id, etc. - product holding time/ notifications (e.g. how long we can keep perishables vs. dry-goods before someone needs to be notified/ business process initiated) - customer/member/product lookup by contact info, past purchases, member number, producer order number, PLU, etc. - a producer/mfg. schema for tracking store->producer orders, status, modifying lead-times - printing invoices with UPCs that can be brought to POS registers Btw, http://djwarehouse.org gave me "Oops…Trac detected an internal error:" I've looked into LFS but their motto "The online shop for for search engines, which appreciate speed" threw me off. Plus I had to dig into the FAQ to find the source and it broke on some dependencies when I tried to install. On Feb 6, 1:50 pm, Chris Moffitt <ch...@moffitts.net> wrote: > You may get some more answers on the Satchmo list but I assume all those > folks are on this list too. I'll attempt to provide some answers here > because it's probably of interest to the broader community. > > Whenever I hear people talking about writing something from scratch, I think > about these two articles > -http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001284.htmlhttp://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/07/01/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/ > > First off, I realize Satchmo is nowhere near the same as stack overflow but > the principal is the same. Satchmo has been under active development for > almost 3 years and it's by no means complete and nowhere near perfect. That > being said, it does do a lot & has a lot of thought put into how to balance > ease of use and functionality with the ability to customize. There could be > a lot of debate about how well we've managed to do it & reasonable people > could disagree about our approach; but there is a fairly significant amount > of work to start from scratch. In fact, if Satchmo seems too much overkill > for your needs, then you might want to look at some of the alternatives > (which I have no personal experience with) > like:http://djwarehouse.org/wikihttp://www.getlfs.com/ > > Or if you feel you need to write one from scratch, this is probably as good > a place as any to start:http://django-ecommerce.blogspot.com/ > > Now, to answer your earlier question about how to customize Satchmo, a lot > depends on what you actually need to do. Writing a custom shipping module or > modifying the templates is trivial. If you need to yank out the entire > product model and use something new then it might be more of a challenge. If > you can discuss a bit more about the changes you would need to make, we can > probably provide some more guidance on the relative difficulty of getting > them done. > > -Chris > > On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 12:57 PM, snfctech <tschm...@sacfoodcoop.com> wrote: > > I'm building an order entry and tracking system for a Food Co-op for > > their case and special orders. We don't need the system to be on-line > > (at the moment), but many of the system requirements are already > > present in many existing e-commerce solutions (product catalog/search, > > order entry screens, order tracking/history, etc.) > > > Initially, I was thinking of building the system from scratch using > > web2py or Django. (The RoR Spree project looks pretty interesting, > > too - but I'm already writing a product/customer ETL in Jython and > > don't want to balance the two languages - both Python and Ruby are new > > to me.) Web2py doesn't have any existing e-commerce project, so that > > lead me to look at Django/Satchmo. I'm guessing the Satchmo > > customization necessary is probably on the order of 20-30%. > > > The question is whether that 20-30% customization is going to be more > > of a headache than rolling my own clean order-entry and tracking > > system with nothing extra I don't need. Has anyone had a similar > > experience they can share? I would be especially interested in > > anyone's experiences with customizing/extending Satchmo. > > > Thanks in advance for any tips. > > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > > "Django users" group. > > To post to this group, send email to django-us...@googlegroups.com. > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > > django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<django-users%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> > > . > > For more options, visit this group at > >http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-us...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en.
