Messages

Hi Ming,

Yes, that's a start however what I'd really like is customisable links on the navigation so I can add additional administrative capability - a launch button off customer is a fairly clunky alternative, particularly if the extra capability isn't customer related.  Having done a fairly detailed review of the admin app now there are quite a few extensions that I think are needed:
- import/export of products via an upload page
- simple content management / editing
- store homepage / search page / category page config , eg:
  - ability turn on/off parts of the page
  - simple layout config (2/3 columns, etc)
  - ability to create content in a simple HTML editor (like this forum!)
  - ability to mix content & product details on homepage, category pages, etc

Do you think a customisable menu bar is a possibility?

Regards,
Don

PS - I've done a fairly comprehensive review of the admin tool and have lots of usability feedback plus a few bugs (fairly minor) and some suggestions for further enhancements.  How should I submit this?  (it's about 2 or 3 pages of text).

Hi Pete,

Hmm - yes, you're right - I've been doing a bit of looking around and it appears virtually impossible to implement pluggable modules.

Here's another idea - could you have a configurable set of menu items (potentially setup using the existing attributes table) that have URL's associated with them.  When clicked, they then load the URL into an IFRAME in the internal window.  I found an example of this here:

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit/browse_thread/thread/c9387570d8726ff7

The only concern with this is attaching roles to the menu items (ie. security) and potentially passing through security details to the IFRAME URL - any ideas?  In other apps I've worked on we loaded the IFRAME app using a POST and passing through a userid & one-way hashed password using a standard routine (MD5) and processed a logon in the background.

Do you think it may be possible to add something like this? 

While not ideal, it does provide a very workable extention mechanism.

Regards,
Don

Hi Konakart / Pete,

I've been looking for a good open-source java shopping cart for a while and this looks like the best thing around - congratulations on a great piece of work!

Similarly to the prior poster (mtoon), the admin app seems to do a lot of what I need, however I'd like to add a few pages as well.  A friend (ie. not much money in it) has a shop and would like to have a web presence - the issue is he has a lot of stock and needs to update the catalog frequently.  While you have an OK importer for techos, I'd like to add an admin page that allows easy upload of product files.  As a secondary piece of work I'd like to potentially integrate it with EANNET / GS1 where his suppliers maintain product catalogues - this isn't too hard to do - GS1 have an EDI interface and there is another open-source tool (http://www.mec-eagle.sourceforge.net) that makes it simple to do.

Ideally you could provide a hook in the admin app setup to add extra menu items - it looks like you've used something similar to the sample mailbox app from GWT - when it builds the stackPanel you could just read a config file that contained the class of any extra tabs to add and then just add them at the bottom - this would be fairly simple would it not? 

Regards,
Don