OMG there's 6 months of my life I didn't plan on spending that way. Around the start of the year you might have seen a thread from us about how excited we were that two new projects for us would be furthering the c5 cause - a new file manager and integration with magento ecommerce..
Well the new file manager is awesome, everyone agrees - happened as we expected.
Magento, did not.
I'm sure that's a lovely app for people who need it, but it really couldn't be more opposite in approach to concrete5. It's huge, bloated in every way, feature rich to the point of abject confusion. A lot of things seem to only kind of work, and it generally reeks of the kind of architectural thinking I associate with Java, not PHP. Now they've got an "enterprise" version that costs 9k/year, to which I say "meh." I'm not trying to start beef - I agree it IS better than OSCommerce by far, it's probably the best open source enterprise level ecommerce solution out there (at least that i can find) the reality is - it and concrete5 are like oil and water. Add in the joys of any client vendor relationship and a project we initially expected to take 6-8 weeks ate up all our attention for 6 months.
2) we're going to start polishing up our own c5 eCommerce add-on right NOW.
3) thank you for sticking with us.. We've tried to pay attention but we certainly have been less responsive than we'd like to. You can expect to see a new version of c5 released before the end of July along with a lot of new add-ons from both us and the community that have been just sitting there.
thx gang,
I feel a huge weight being lifted off my shoulders, it's good to be back.
Logging into concrete5 logs you into magento, making an account in c5 does the same. Making an account in checkout on magento makes a c5 account for you... so single signon as it were
We also built an import routine for concrete5 to get product data out of magento and into a summary table in concrete5, and a "product block" you can use to place a picture and any meta data you want in the page.
beyond that, its just a server with both running - anything with store.barefootbooks.com is magento, anything www. or root is c5. we basically treat category, product detail, and cart pages as magento and the rest as c5...
if anyone wants this kinda setup, first i'd say - why?? then i'd say, that's a consulting gig and i'd be happy to help you get to where you get on an hourly basis.. assuming you know you're making a franken-monster site...
I'm glad the franken-monster approach worked out, lol! I'm currently involved in my own version of a franken-monster project my company has suddenly undertaken so I know the feeling.
our ecommerce will be entirely our stuff.. with some "out of the box" thinking and elegant interface stuff.. we're not going to try to make it do everything for everyone as magento has that covered, but it will be a much friendlier way to go.
Have you looked at Open Cart before?