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Re: minivend and competitors



With minivend you find new thing every day, and each time it seems that
nothing is easy with them, especialy that no one in the mailing list
answer you, and reading the Kabalh is easeir then their Docs.

last time I handled minivend I found the flycat, it was like a dream to me
becouse I found a solution to my troubles,
The flyCat - the ability to add products from static pages like this

<FORM ACTION="/cgi-bin/wjl/process" METHOD="POST">
<INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME=sku VALUE="test^99-102^The Mona
Lisa^mod1^1^2.00^.35^ea.
^1.2^/wjl/images/radcats1.gif">
</FORM>

this was sound to me as good solution, and I say it from two conceptions:

1. I love php especially the new one version 4 (that handle session very
well), which is very rich, strong, easy to understand and most important:
to each of my Questions from when I was newbie till now I almost always I
got answer from the mailing list in less then an hour.
so now I can use php to get and manipulate information from database.

2. I still use minivend as basket, backtracking, shipping and all thing
that are simple with no database handling and no awful search process.

but still I have few stupid Q like how to order from static page (arranged
dynamically by php) more then one items in  a click and how to immigrate
to minivend 4.

So Im kinda on a cross road, I even thought of buy full commerce program
but i might find out that those program will not be better then minivend.
So the main Q is what will be a good solution to the linux community when
coming to build a full commerce store.

"Reuven M. Lerner" wrote:

> >>>>> Michael Ben-Nes wrote:
>
>   Michael> Im using minivend as an e-commerce platform.  Its working
>   Michael> great but Im thinking replace it with other platform
>   Michael> because the support is really lame.
>
>   Michael> Any one know of a good e-commerce platform for unix that
>   Michael> support: mysql, basket, shipping, user-db ....
>
> At my lecture on Friday, I briefly mentioned MiniVend.  Here's my
> basic experience, in two sentences:
>
> - MiniVend is very powerful, and can do anything you want.
> - Figuring out how to get MiniVend to do what you want, however, is a
>   maddening experience.
>
> Now for the expanded report:
>
> I've been working with MiniVend for about two years, and have had
> near-daily struggles to get it to do what I (and my clients) want.
> When I first saw it, I was really delighted to have found a
> ready-made, GPL'ed, e-commerce solution with templating and Perl.  I
> have since begun to have very strong criticisms of MiniVend -- its
> lack of decent error-handling, bizarre variable scoping, easily wedged
> state information, bad documentation, odd bugs, lack of serious
> support for SQL, and so on.
>
> Every month or two, I think that I've *finally* figured out how to
> work with MiniVend, and how to get it to do what I want.  And then
> something happens to convince me otherwise.
>
> Unfortunately, there's no good free alternative.  In the last few
> weeks, one of my programmers and I have looked into YAMS and
> OpenSales, which seemed to have the most promise of all free
> solutions.  I'll admit that we didn't give it all that much attention
> (since one of our MiniVend sites was crashing and burning for no
> apparent reason), but it seems that YAMS is too underpowered for most
> needs and that OpenSales simply isn't ready for prime time.  It's
> really a shame, too, since OpenSales looks like it has the potential
> to give MiniVend a serious run for its money.
>
> Just this morning, I spoke with one of my clients about shopping
> carts.  I told him that it would probably be easier to build something
> ourselves from mod_perl, Mason, Apache::Session, and DBI than wrestle
> with MiniVend yet again.  In such a scenario, Mason takes care of the
> templates, Apache::Session takes care of the state information, DBI
> lets us talk to the relational database of our choice, and mod_perl
> takes care of the speed and database connection pooling.  You lose
> MiniVend's generic shipping calculator, tracking information, and
> error pages -- but these shouldn't take much time to write.  And you
> won't be locked into MiniVend's odd templates, which lie somewhere in
> the twilight zone between Perl and macros.
>
> And yes, MiniVend has built-in CyberCash support.  But given that
> CyberCash supplies Perl libraries for people to use, I imagine that it
> wouldn't be hard to write some home-grown libraries that talk to
> CyberCash.  And if you use a component system like Mason, you can
> reuse the underlying layers with subsequent shopping carts,
> redesigning the top-level templates.
>
> You might also want to check out Zope (http://www.zope.org) and ACS
> (http://www.arsdigita.com).  I'm sure that there are commerce systems
> available for both, although I'm not familiar enough to say for sure.
>
> By the way, I've found the MiniVend support to be quite good, with
> immediate answers to almost any question.  Unfortunately, the answer
> you get from the mailing list is almost never, "It's documented in the
> manual," because the manual is difficult to understand, sparse in
> important places, and simply wrong in others.  Support is important,
> but decent documentation is at least as important.
>
> If you want a simple store with decent templates, MiniVend is a good
> answer, and will do a good job.  But if you want serious SQL support,
> or the ability to make simple changes without having to read dozens of
> pages of documentation, I would consider other options, including
> building your own.
>
> Reuven

--
--------------------------
Canaan Surfing Ltd.
Internet Service Providers
Ben-Nes Michael - Manager
Tel: 972-6-6925757
Fax: 972-6-6925858
http://www.canaan.co.il
--------------------------



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