Porting GoodRelations from OSC - clarification

[semantium]

Dear Kevin,

additionally, it might be interesting for you the Alex Stolz is in our team too and works on a new release for OSCommerce.

Furthermore, there will be a step-by-step tutorial.

Best

Uwe

[stalsoft]

Dear Kevin,

I found your post on this board and appreciate that you are interested in developing an extension for Zen Cart. I'm Alex Stolz, the developer of the GoodRelations extensions for osCommerce and Joomla/Virtuemart.

At the moment I'm progressing on a much improved version of the GoodRelations extension for Virtuemart/Joomla - it's in early alpha stage so far (if interested, see a preview on the demo shop at http://www.stalsoft.com/dip/joomla/ and the resulting impact on Yahoo's product page rendering at http://tiny.cc/l9rgo).
Once I've finished that, I'm planning to rewrite the osCommerce extension insofar that I'm going to implement it in a more modular way (it will make use of Django-like RDFa templates provided by Prof. Martin Hepp), which means that RDFa snippets are included no matter what template the user is applying. With the present/outdated version, a user was limited to use the sample template of osCommerce, which is pretty unsatisfying in my opinion. This will of course have to change with the next release.

Regarding your questions from above, I'm not sure of how much Zen Cart and osCommerce have still in common and whether they are using the same conceptual design in their databases. To check this out would be a good starting point (especially how to gather price information, datasheet details, etc.), because the RDFa code of the next release will basically be rendered through accepting associative arrays from database results as input.

Best wishes,
Alex

[stalsoft]

and appreciate that you are interested in developing an extension for Zen Cart

I meant I appreciate that you consider to port the OSC extension to Zen Cart.

[Kim]

Regarding your questions from above, I'm not sure of how much Zen Cart and osCommerce have still in common and whether they are using the same conceptual design in their databases. To check this out would be a good starting point (especially how to gather price information, datasheet details, etc.), because the RDFa code of the next release will basically be rendered through accepting associative arrays from database results as input.

We do still have some commonality, but we get farther and farther with each major release.

( JMHO - but if you want to work on an up and coming project instead of an old dead one then Zen Cart is the place to concentrate )

[stalsoft]

( JMHO - but if you want to work on an up and coming project instead of an old dead one then Zen Cart is the place to concentrate )

Good point! Will consider this!

How about the back-end configuration? Is there a means to integrate the addon's configuration into the back-end without having to hack too deep into the system?
Does Zen Cart provide a developer tutorial for addons or similar?

Thx,
Alex

[profitshock]

@Kim Is there any way we could get advance site of any new db schemas?
It strikes me that having a gr module from the outset of the new release will raise the profile of Zen Cart further.

@stalsoft Hello Alex, the Zen Cart wiki is the closest I've been able to find as a developers tutorial. There are hooks in place which allow developers to create modules in a way that do not alter core files. In combination with theme overrides I've been able to get fairly close to a working template but as I'm not a developer/coder it's a very slow process what with uploading changes, reading the bug report and trying to work out how to fix things.