Porting GoodRelations from OSC - clarification

[profitshock]

I am reading
http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.p...dules_from_osC
and would like some clarification on a few points relating to 'tep_db_query and tep_db_fetch_array in if' and 'tep_db_query and tep_db_fetch_array in while'

The first question I have is:

Does Zen Cart do away completely with "tep_db_fetch_array"?

The if example given says to change

$my_var_query = tep_db_query("query stuff");
if ($my_var = tep_db_fetch_array($my_var_query))  {

to

$my_var = $db->Execute("query stuff");
if (!$my_var->EOF)  {

If so, using the following example as the starting point:

if(defined('STORE_COUNTRY')) {
$store_country = tep_db_query("select countries_iso_code_3 as code from ".TABLE_COUNTRIES." where countries_id='".STORE_COUNTRY."'");
if($store_country_values = tep_db_fetch_array($store_country))
$rdf .= $format->indent(4)."<vcard:country-name xml:lang=\"en\">".$store_country_values['code']."</vcard:country-name>";
}

Would the following conversion be correct

if(defined('STORE_COUNTRY')) {
$store_country = $db->Execute("select countries_iso_code_3 as code from ".TABLE_COUNTRIES." where countries_id='".STORE_COUNTRY."'");
if($store_country_values->EOF)
$rdf .= $format->indent(4)."<vcard:country-name xml:lang=\"en\">".$store_country_values['code']."</vcard:country-name>";
}

In the case of the while usage, if the starting point is

$products = tep_db_query($products);
while($products_values = tep_db_fetch_array($products)):
$rdf .= $format->indent(2)."<gr:offers rdf:resource=\"#Offering_".$products_values['products_id']."\"/>";
endwhile;

Would the following conversion be correct

$products = $db->Execute($products);
while($products_values->EOF):
$rdf .= $format->indent(2)."<gr:offers rdf:resource=\"#Offering_".$products_values['products_id']."\"/>";
$products_values->MoveNext();
)
endwhile;

Apart from the obvious reasons for asking I am confused by the use of the colon in the initial while query.

The aim is to end up with a true semantic enabled cart using the GR ontology. OSC, Magento and others already have this capability but ZenCart does not and I believe that needs to change for ZenCart users to stand a better chance of having sites and products found in the search engines as the web develops.

For those seriously interested in this project see http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/ - it is the future of ecommerce

many thanks

Kevin

[profitshock]

bump ...

[semantium]

Hello, I'm Uwe Stoll, researcher at Professor Martin Hepp's chair for e-commerce and web science.

In this post I want to point out some additional ressources which may be helpful dealing with GoodRelations.

A complete tutorial will be available shortly at:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/...s4ShopSoftware

Also, please checkout our free django-style XHTML templates to generate RDFA easyly:
http://code.google.com/p/templates4goodrelations/

A minimal example can be found at:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/...ionsQuickstart

In this context, use a sitemap.xml and mention it in robots.txt.

Furthermore, pls join our mailing list at

http://ebusiness-unibw.org/cgi-bin/m.../goodrelations

and refer to the GoodRelations Cookbook at

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/...s_and_Examples

Best,

Uwe

[profitshock]

Hello Uwe,

many thanks for taking the time to register and post, it's great to see a member of Professor Hepp's team here!

Personally I've been following the development of GoodRelations for well over a year and am very impressed at the advances made in such a short period of time. The introduction of the Rich Snippet Generator at http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/grsnippetgen/ was a great starting point for people like myself who want to implement RDFa data into sites. Having said that it still didn't help with adding gr data to the products in Zen Cart so I was happy to see the plugin for OSC as it provided the basis for a plugin for Zen Cart.

While I am familiar with Zen Cart's template override system I'm not a coder and assumed it would be quicker for me to try to port the existing gr OSC framework developed by Alex Stolz available at Google Groups over to Zen Cart, rather than start from the beginning. Once I started I realised that there were more differences than I had expected hence my post seeking assistance with what many would consider basics.

I can only hope that the Zen Cart developers and others in the community take the time to investigate what GoodRelations is, how it can help them improve their carts/business and join in the discussion and development of a GoodRelations plugin/module for Zen Cart.

Best,

Kevin

[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.