No I am not mad. I been swamped with tons of things happening lately personally and work related.
I am still supporting this project but I've turned my focus towards a complete rewrite of the software so I been MIA for a bit burning the midnight oil the past couple months. I do apologize if I offended any one with my brief absence.
So a status on where I am is probably in order here....
The "other" cart base I was using is just too damn broken to work well so I made a decision to ditch it instead of attempting a rewrite of the framework. God bless Chris and crew. What they are doing with ZC is good stuff. And I don't envy them. Make sure you guys buy them some coffee for sure.
I managed to hack in the world wide shipping options over the past couple of days and that seems to be working well with static/dynamic entries. I've got the shipping weight pulling from ZC as well. You have the choice of using what it pulls or setting up individual fields for domestic and/or international along with service methods. I need to finish writing those forms too. More on that later.
I think I've found a solution for the checkout redirect issue and the $7k eBay payment, which of course I don't have. I have some scripts that I can pull PayPal transactions directly and compare transaction numbers to closed auctions. I am planning on doing a data insert of this information into ZC so you don't have to manually track the orders via PayPal. This of course doesn't give you the upsell/cross sell directly but it does give you an email campaign manager so you can send out emails to your customers who bought product foo and maybe give them a coupon towards their next purchase.
As with the original osc interface form it's completely gone. Looking back on it, it was just horrible. In its place I now am using a Spry AJAX framework with tabbed panels and a nice clean and simple webby layout. Nothing too fancy and you only see the data you need to see on a single page. So far there is no scrolling for me.
What else? Grid views with paging (completed). Revise Auction, End Auction added. Motors support is in the database and in the works.
eBay Key manager is built in now. You should be able to enter your username on the Add User form and get a token from eBay with a click of a button.
I've also been writing documentation as I go and integrating it directly into the interface. If you need help you click the link and you get a small flyout explaining what goes where etc.
I've also whipped up a basic tinymce editor with image management. I decided against using eBay image server as I figured everyone here manages their images locally anyway and that is unlimited. Video support is on the books to be integrated with YouTube for those of you that would like to add a personal touch, example or product advertisements from your dealers showing the benefits and features etc.
I've looked into some auction design template options but to be honest I haven't gotten that far yet and I am more of a programmer than artist. It looks like a couple well placed DIVs will do the trick however and I can wrap the content for you automagically.
And probably the biggest change is that ALP now uses its own database so you don't have to change a single thing on your cart to use it.
Well that's enough for now. I gotta go finish some more forms and write some SQL.
Again I apologize if I ticked anyone off.