Adding a page to KonaKartAdmin

[mtoon]

Is there anyway to add functionality to the admin application?  We'd like to create a page to allow us to credit an order using our payment gateway.  We just need to add a simple page to the admin appliction.  Thank you!

[pete]

Hi,

We don't supply the source code of the Admin App (which is all written using the Google Web Toolkit), although we do provide fixed price customizations, so please contact sales AT konakart.com if you are interested in that service.

For your particular problem, have you considered just changing the state of the order through the Admin App and using a callout (http://www.konakart.com/configurationfaq.php#how_can_i_make_something_happen_when_an) to process the business logic involved. There is also a Returns section in the Admin App where you could keep track of partial returns.

[don.elliott]

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

[pete]

Yes, that would be fairly simple but unfortunately I don't think that it it would work. The UI side of the Admin App (GWT) is written in java which is translated to java script during the build process. This means that the application is a machine generated java script file running in the browser that wouldn't be able to instantiate a java class at run time.

Is this what you meant ?

[don.elliott]

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

[ming]

Don,

In the next release we have introduced a custom button on the Customer panel that allows you to define your own URL to jump to if clicked.   It passes the user id and the session id as parameters so that access rights can be checked.   This might give you some options?   

Ming

[don.elliott]

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).

[pete]

Do you think a customisable menu bar is a possibility?

Yes I do. We could try to get it in for the next release although we can't guarantee any dates just yet. For the security, what we could do is to pass the sessionId assuming that the protocol is always https. With the sessionId you could instantiate a KonaKart Admin Engine instance and use it to make API calls. You could also use it to get the user id and roles etc.

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

The import / export facility from the Admin App would be a nice extension to what we provide. The other features could also be very useful for a certain type of customer base. We haven't concentrated on this type of feature because our typical customer just takes the JSPs and modifies them directly to fit his UI requirements. I could imagine the things you mention, being very useful for an ISP providing KonaKart to customers that require a very simple setup procedure to get their store up and running as quickly and easily as possible.

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).

Could you send it to support at konakart dot com ? We appreciate your time spent on this.