Jean - Portal Store is ok for a few items..but not alot - it doesn't (maybe it does now - I haven't seen ok) allow for importing.. Have you ever tried to import.. that was one of the main reasons, apart from the numerous builds, 6 months of wasting time
that I gave up and moved on.
Yes you can modify catalook using those configurator slots - to be available for some/all/ of the products.. as I read it, it means you can 1 range of shirts available in 4 colours, and another in 6 colours, using the same configurator and at the product
level, not take the extra two colours. Does that make sense?
I also had issues with catalook - I'm not saying they are/were perfect. My comment stands firm-
Value for money
Ease of installation
Support and open ideas to enhancements
Speed of suggested enhancements being implemented
Ability to upgrade (this has been an ongoing gripe I have had)
Value of my time in management and setup (4 hours on a standard store)
Speed of importing products
Documentation (however hard to decipher - there is good documentation)
Consistenty methodology and process - Once you get it, you can gauge how it should work and try that.
Portal store might be brilliant - who knows.. but there must be so many people who invested $200 for a product that never worked like it was supposed to.
Maybe Richard can get this working brilliantly - I don't know, I wish him the best, he's got more modules to get polished and crafted than a silversmith.. He's gamer than I would ever be!. I've heard wonders about him but for me, I'm sick of promises, waiting,
and sick of being beta tester (not by choice here) on products where people ask premium dollars, provide no support, no documentation.(This is a generalisation, not for one moment a comment about Richard who is a well respected coder)
I'm really happy that there have been some success stories - but I'm working on porting catalook to an18,000 product quote cart.. It will be good for that purpose.
However, it will not satisfy every purpose and for the money - I surely would not be expecting it to. I spoke with a new client yesterday - He said his developer was going to write a shopping cart for him for $1K and I said - good luck - if it was that
inexpensive, then we'd see lots of stores online.. It's a complex project.. (as we can see on forum here) He was a bit doubtful that he could get a fully functional custom written from scratch shopping cart for 1,000 in 2 weeks and was new to DNN.
I've heard there are carts coming out, and still wait patiently to try them.. But I'm not going to invest in one single product again unless I trust the developer, see they have a working example, half decent documentation.
Again, there is no monetary value at all for me behind any of the modules I comment about, unless you saw the words -XD in front of the module .. I'm just an advocate to support those who are not blinded by greed or prestige in providing what they say for
the money they state. Of course you can't compare these products to custom written software.. it's not fair to, so that's not what I'm implying.. but boy, I give away good work, as well as charge for good work, and so do lots of other developers here, and
they'd be just as annoyed as me to read about companies/people who charge for second rate products. It gives an awful impression on those coming into DNN and that is something I never want to see!!
However, I do like being on this thread here because I'm sure thats' where we'll see those who have got something good to offer, post information. And I only know what I know because I've spent many hundreds of hours trying to get things to work.. and I
don't see why people should be a developer to get the edge of getting something to work.
I guess I'm all wordy again about this because I love what can be achieved... and if someone new coming to DNN spends time reading this thread.. they will pick up some great perspectives and hopefully be comfortable with whatever decision they make! Well
this weekend is my deadline for my own store - so I've had as much agonising over it as anyone.. and next week we'll see if I was able to walk the talk!! [:#]
And Jean, I'm really happy to read your posts.. It might sounds like I'm giving people a hard time.. but what value did they put on my time when releasing products that I spent 6 months in trying to do as they said it would do... I have some value in my
time too, as does everyone else who visits here.. Do you have any links to the stores you have working - I think lots of us would like to have a look.
Lets see... Two weeks work. $1000. That works out to $12.50/hr assuming a 40/hr work week. I couldn't compete with that. Although I think it will be more like Two Weeks. $1000 and 120 hour work weeks and an unfinished module. Some of these modules have
been in development for 2 years now. For someone to think they can duplicate that in 2 weeks is just ridiculous. What is even worse is that the customer believes them.
Nina - I have to say, there are days when I have to agree with you - I must have been crazy [:S] to take this on.
Our first goal was getting the code to a point in which we could change it quickly and reliably. 6.5 is close to where we've met that goal. We're thrown just about every thing we've had into Portal Store over the last two months and are still on an aggressive
schedule for version 6.6 which will probably be out in a few months' time. Let's see.... 90+ ascx's and about 10 server controls - only 10 of which existed in 6.4 base in which we started with. Throw in a DNN 3 / BDPDT conversion into that, and you get
the idea that I've been just a tad bit busy. We've also taken some heat because of it - because you simply don't re-write a large complex application in a 6 week period of time without a few hiccups. So, yes, Nina - comparing the version you might have
been running to what we've done to it would be like comparing DNN 1 to 3 :)
As far as your comments on importing, yeah - that old one was rather..interesting. We've re-wrote that (call it delete all code, and restart) and created a foundation that allows for quickly expanding import capabilities with the minimal amount of coding
in the system. So as we get suggestions and feedback from clients, the import capabilities will expand dramatically. I don't like writing a lot of code, but I do like writing the code once and making it work in uses and ways I can't necessarily envision
myself needing to in the future but allowing the capabilities to be there to quickly do it when I do. So for instance, to implement ebay importing into store, would literally take 100 lines of code or less to create the import source for ebay xml files.
Let me get this latest maintenance release out the door and I'll send you a copy Nina - I'm curious on your comparisons between what you did use and how it is now.
Regards,
Richard
ByDesignWebSights
www.dotnetnuke-modules.com
Portal Store, Advanced Email Manager, SiteTrack, Support Desk and many other modules for your DNN platform.
I wont say you are wrong but what he might do is take a asp cart and throw it into an iframe - bet something like that takes him no time- unfortunatly the customer will see it too late - and why not buy the catalook module anyway for what 200? maybe thats
what hes going to do and resell it to the client for 1000
Ooh.. this makes for such interesting reading - it's one of my favourite threads you know! And read by so many who really want to see good ecommerce work.
Joe, I didn't put alllll of my comments of what I said to the client in forum.. Firstly - I never want to be accused of stealing clients, depriving developers of work by pushing them to other product because I'm really sensitive to the fact that alot of
people listen / read my thoughts and in fact have made decisions based my own personal opinion and I want to see lots of work for developers - that's how DNN will further grow...
So, I worded this in a way that it would be intersting to see how a new developer in the DNN environment could be misguided into thinking they could whip up an ecommerce product in a week as a trial, when there were very experienced dnn developers who had
put thousands of coding time into products which were just now coming to maturity ... and perhaps while it was in production, consider working with another model, that while not perfect, might suit for now and he could look at turning his site out in 2 - 3
weeks - say 80% perfect, instead of 2 - 3 months and maybe even more money than he had antipicated, and take advantage of his 1K per month magazine advertisements he's just taken on for a fast expanding market and not chance losing that as well with a site
that couldn't take orders.. but he's sold on DNN and contacted me, so he was quite appreciative of the different options available to him and felt he was able to make choices with more confidence. $1,000 don't get you far these days with code.. ...
And Richard.. as I said - I've heard you've done wonders... and your comparisons are probably quite accurate comparing DNN 1 - DNN3 in development processes. And I am glad to take my comments in the spirit in which they were meant and acknowledge some of
the shortcomings that exist and have made changes because I think DNN3 is the beginning of a new way of doing things and documentation is so much better for developers.
Nothing will or ever take the place of the diversity of DotNetNuke - whether we like it or not, it's got the foundations of being a mover and shaker in the CMS (content management system) environment.
I'm happy as products come to commercial reality to provide some comparison tables so people can see what different products offer as there is so much diversity in what is to offer. I am also an advocate of DNN solutions - if Iframes were an option, I'd
have been able to turn out lots of sites.. but on principal.. a DNN product is the only way to go.
I do have some links to my stores. Keep in mind that I'm still trying to get a chance to enhance the look and feel and put the new PS skinning feature to work.[:P] Working on getting the functionality working first and making it pretty later. (So much to
do)
So what you're going to see is the skinning almost straight out of the box. I haven't changed anything but the catalog intro template and I didn't do much with it. And, as I mentioned earlier, my products are not your typical items. I wish they were as I
think that would make my life a lot easier. :)
Also, I'm still on DNN2. I plan to upgrade as quickly as I can, and have no idea of what DNN3 & the upgraded modules are going to bring...
This has been a great thread to read while trying to decide on which shopping cart to purchase. We origianlly started with the ibuyspy cart and customized to work for us, it ended up being a stand alone app.
I really like DNN portal concept, I am concerned with staying in the main stream so when newer versions come out we dont have to start over. I want to focus my company on what we do best and rely on others to advance areas like shopping carts, skining and
other modules. Its much more cost effective to pay them than to do in house. The thought of installing one module that is not properly designed can break the whole site is frustrating.
With that said it would be great to see a testing group that for a fee could test a module and give it some sort of certification like "DNN core compliant" or something that tells the consumer its been tested and installs without errors and is upgrade compatible.
I feel DNN 3 being on .net 2.0 should have some longevity now and hope module creators follow suit. For this I would pay premium dollars.
Respectfully,
Rick McCracken
President,
Market Depot inc.
I'd like to chime in as a user who has been working with both cataLook and PortalStore since summer of 2004. I've had production sites with both since that time. While each does have a few unique advantages, they are both very, very good products and both
have fabulous support.
For awhile, PortalStore was slipping and I was even thinking of abandoning it and migrating sites over to cataLook. However, then ByDesign bought it and Richard Cox has been fabulous.
In a way this puts me in a difficult position because I tend to find a single vendor and remain loyal to that vendor, I'm not accustomed to having such great relationships with two competing products. But what can I say, they are both great products with
great support...the consumer really wins.
Catalook gives this forum thread as a place to go for tech support. So I'm highly dubious of this being the truth. I'm trying to use 3.47 for DNN 3.13 of Catalook. In the process of checking out after filling out billing address information, I get the
following error:
A critical error has occurred. Procedure 'CAT_GetProductTax' expects parameter '@City', which was not supplied.
xddg
Star
9364 Points
1874 Posts
MVP
Re: Stores
Mar 31, 2005 09:18 PM|LINK
Jean - Portal Store is ok for a few items..but not alot - it doesn't (maybe it does now - I haven't seen ok) allow for importing.. Have you ever tried to import.. that was one of the main reasons, apart from the numerous builds, 6 months of wasting time that I gave up and moved on.
Yes you can modify catalook using those configurator slots - to be available for some/all/ of the products.. as I read it, it means you can 1 range of shirts available in 4 colours, and another in 6 colours, using the same configurator and at the product level, not take the extra two colours. Does that make sense?
I also had issues with catalook - I'm not saying they are/were perfect. My comment stands firm-
Portal store might be brilliant - who knows.. but there must be so many people who invested $200 for a product that never worked like it was supposed to.
Maybe Richard can get this working brilliantly - I don't know, I wish him the best, he's got more modules to get polished and crafted than a silversmith.. He's gamer than I would ever be!. I've heard wonders about him but for me, I'm sick of promises, waiting, and sick of being beta tester (not by choice here) on products where people ask premium dollars, provide no support, no documentation.(This is a generalisation, not for one moment a comment about Richard who is a well respected coder)
I'm really happy that there have been some success stories - but I'm working on porting catalook to an18,000 product quote cart.. It will be good for that purpose.
However, it will not satisfy every purpose and for the money - I surely would not be expecting it to. I spoke with a new client yesterday - He said his developer was going to write a shopping cart for him for $1K and I said - good luck - if it was that inexpensive, then we'd see lots of stores online.. It's a complex project.. (as we can see on forum here) He was a bit doubtful that he could get a fully functional custom written from scratch shopping cart for 1,000 in 2 weeks and was new to DNN.
I've heard there are carts coming out, and still wait patiently to try them.. But I'm not going to invest in one single product again unless I trust the developer, see they have a working example, half decent documentation.
Again, there is no monetary value at all for me behind any of the modules I comment about, unless you saw the words -XD in front of the module .. I'm just an advocate to support those who are not blinded by greed or prestige in providing what they say for the money they state. Of course you can't compare these products to custom written software.. it's not fair to, so that's not what I'm implying.. but boy, I give away good work, as well as charge for good work, and so do lots of other developers here, and they'd be just as annoyed as me to read about companies/people who charge for second rate products. It gives an awful impression on those coming into DNN and that is something I never want to see!!
However, I do like being on this thread here because I'm sure thats' where we'll see those who have got something good to offer, post information. And I only know what I know because I've spent many hundreds of hours trying to get things to work.. and I don't see why people should be a developer to get the edge of getting something to work.
I guess I'm all wordy again about this because I love what can be achieved... and if someone new coming to DNN spends time reading this thread.. they will pick up some great perspectives and hopefully be comfortable with whatever decision they make! Well this weekend is my deadline for my own store - so I've had as much agonising over it as anyone.. and next week we'll see if I was able to walk the talk!! [:#]
And Jean, I'm really happy to read your posts.. It might sounds like I'm giving people a hard time.. but what value did they put on my time when releasing products that I spent 6 months in trying to do as they said it would do... I have some value in my time too, as does everyone else who visits here.. Do you have any links to the stores you have working - I think lots of us would like to have a look.
jbrinkman
Star
9822 Points
1963 Posts
Re: Stores
Mar 31, 2005 09:42 PM|LINK
Richard Cox
Participant
1635 Points
327 Posts
Re: Stores
Mar 31, 2005 09:53 PM|LINK
okay I simply have to respond to Nina [;)]
Nina - I have to say, there are days when I have to agree with you - I must have been crazy [:S] to take this on.
Our first goal was getting the code to a point in which we could change it quickly and reliably. 6.5 is close to where we've met that goal. We're thrown just about every thing we've had into Portal Store over the last two months and are still on an aggressive schedule for version 6.6 which will probably be out in a few months' time. Let's see.... 90+ ascx's and about 10 server controls - only 10 of which existed in 6.4 base in which we started with. Throw in a DNN 3 / BDPDT conversion into that, and you get the idea that I've been just a tad bit busy. We've also taken some heat because of it - because you simply don't re-write a large complex application in a 6 week period of time without a few hiccups. So, yes, Nina - comparing the version you might have been running to what we've done to it would be like comparing DNN 1 to 3 :)
As far as your comments on importing, yeah - that old one was rather..interesting. We've re-wrote that (call it delete all code, and restart) and created a foundation that allows for quickly expanding import capabilities with the minimal amount of coding in the system. So as we get suggestions and feedback from clients, the import capabilities will expand dramatically. I don't like writing a lot of code, but I do like writing the code once and making it work in uses and ways I can't necessarily envision myself needing to in the future but allowing the capabilities to be there to quickly do it when I do. So for instance, to implement ebay importing into store, would literally take 100 lines of code or less to create the import source for ebay xml files.
Let me get this latest maintenance release out the door and I'll send you a copy Nina - I'm curious on your comparisons between what you did use and how it is now.
Regards,
Richard
www.dotnetnuke-modules.com
Portal Store, Advanced Email Manager, SiteTrack, Support Desk and many other modules for your DNN platform.
codegalaxy
Contributor
6910 Points
1475 Posts
Re: Stores
Mar 31, 2005 09:57 PM|LINK
I wont say you are wrong but what he might do is take a asp cart and throw it into an iframe - bet something like that takes him no time- unfortunatly the customer will see it too late - and why not buy the catalook module anyway for what 200? maybe thats what hes going to do and resell it to the client for 1000
Anyway some people can sell anything
read my stupid blog http://codemypantsoff.com
xddg
Star
9364 Points
1874 Posts
MVP
Re: Stores
Mar 31, 2005 10:47 PM|LINK
Ooh.. this makes for such interesting reading - it's one of my favourite threads you know! And read by so many who really want to see good ecommerce work.
Joe, I didn't put alllll of my comments of what I said to the client in forum.. Firstly - I never want to be accused of stealing clients, depriving developers of work by pushing them to other product because I'm really sensitive to the fact that alot of people listen / read my thoughts and in fact have made decisions based my own personal opinion and I want to see lots of work for developers - that's how DNN will further grow...
So, I worded this in a way that it would be intersting to see how a new developer in the DNN environment could be misguided into thinking they could whip up an ecommerce product in a week as a trial, when there were very experienced dnn developers who had put thousands of coding time into products which were just now coming to maturity ... and perhaps while it was in production, consider working with another model, that while not perfect, might suit for now and he could look at turning his site out in 2 - 3 weeks - say 80% perfect, instead of 2 - 3 months and maybe even more money than he had antipicated, and take advantage of his 1K per month magazine advertisements he's just taken on for a fast expanding market and not chance losing that as well with a site that couldn't take orders.. but he's sold on DNN and contacted me, so he was quite appreciative of the different options available to him and felt he was able to make choices with more confidence. $1,000 don't get you far these days with code.. ...
And Richard.. as I said - I've heard you've done wonders... and your comparisons are probably quite accurate comparing DNN 1 - DNN3 in development processes. And I am glad to take my comments in the spirit in which they were meant and acknowledge some of the shortcomings that exist and have made changes because I think DNN3 is the beginning of a new way of doing things and documentation is so much better for developers.
Nothing will or ever take the place of the diversity of DotNetNuke - whether we like it or not, it's got the foundations of being a mover and shaker in the CMS (content management system) environment.
I'm happy as products come to commercial reality to provide some comparison tables so people can see what different products offer as there is so much diversity in what is to offer. I am also an advocate of DNN solutions - if Iframes were an option, I'd have been able to turn out lots of sites.. but on principal.. a DNN product is the only way to go.
Nina Meiers
jagordon05
Member
75 Points
15 Posts
Re: Stores
Apr 01, 2005 06:35 PM|LINK
I do have some links to my stores. Keep in mind that I'm still trying to get a chance to enhance the look and feel and put the new PS skinning feature to work.[:P] Working on getting the functionality working first and making it pretty later. (So much to do)
So what you're going to see is the skinning almost straight out of the box. I haven't changed anything but the catalog intro template and I didn't do much with it. And, as I mentioned earlier, my products are not your typical items. I wish they were as I think that would make my life a lot easier. :)
Also, I'm still on DNN2. I plan to upgrade as quickly as I can, and have no idea of what DNN3 & the upgraded modules are going to bring...
http://www.naipc.org/Default.aspx?tabid=427
http://www.nrmlaonline.org/Default.aspx?tabid=477
http://www.housingonline.com/Default.aspx?tabid=236
http://www.housingonline.com/Default.aspx?tabid=550
http://www.housingonline.com/Default.aspx?tabid=268
http://www.housingonline.com/Default.aspx?tabid=389
Enjoy!
Jean
Globale
Member
10 Points
2 Posts
Re: Stores
Apr 12, 2005 04:38 PM|LINK
This has been a great thread to read while trying to decide on which shopping cart to purchase. We origianlly started with the ibuyspy cart and customized to work for us, it ended up being a stand alone app.
I really like DNN portal concept, I am concerned with staying in the main stream so when newer versions come out we dont have to start over. I want to focus my company on what we do best and rely on others to advance areas like shopping carts, skining and other modules. Its much more cost effective to pay them than to do in house. The thought of installing one module that is not properly designed can break the whole site is frustrating.
With that said it would be great to see a testing group that for a fee could test a module and give it some sort of certification like "DNN core compliant" or something that tells the consumer its been tested and installs without errors and is upgrade compatible.
I feel DNN 3 being on .net 2.0 should have some longevity now and hope module creators follow suit. For this I would pay premium dollars.
Respectfully,
Rick McCracken
President,
Market Depot inc.
smiller@call...
Member
115 Points
23 Posts
Re: Stores
May 07, 2005 01:55 AM|LINK
I'd like to chime in as a user who has been working with both cataLook and PortalStore since summer of 2004. I've had production sites with both since that time. While each does have a few unique advantages, they are both very, very good products and both have fabulous support.
For awhile, PortalStore was slipping and I was even thinking of abandoning it and migrating sites over to cataLook. However, then ByDesign bought it and Richard Cox has been fabulous.
In a way this puts me in a difficult position because I tend to find a single vendor and remain loyal to that vendor, I'm not accustomed to having such great relationships with two competing products. But what can I say, they are both great products with great support...the consumer really wins.
Shane
dudestopit
Member
10 Points
2 Posts
Catalook Error
May 11, 2005 11:44 PM|LINK
Catalook gives this forum thread as a place to go for tech support. So I'm highly dubious of this being the truth. I'm trying to use 3.47 for DNN 3.13 of Catalook. In the process of checking out after filling out billing address information, I get the following error:
A critical error has occurred.
Procedure 'CAT_GetProductTax' expects parameter '@City', which was not supplied.
This is at http://www.corvairaink.com
Thanks,
Chris
smiller@call...
Member
115 Points
23 Posts
Re: Catalook Error
May 12, 2005 12:31 AM|LINK