RE: [mv] Minivend Admin Interface

["Christopher Thompson" <ct@arborinternet.com>]

******    message to minivend-users from "Christopher Thompson" <ct@arborinternet.com>     ******

I think the things you mentioned (permissions, file ownership, arbitrary
tables) are already part of MiniMate and would not be part of the system I
briefly spec'd. I think Minivend/MiniMate does a reasonable job of
supporting developers/webmasters in managing Minivend and catalogs.

My proposal was for a web based admin interface for non-techical users to
deal with products and orders. It had the following basic features:

- The ability to modify the products database. The base products.asc file
would be supported. It could deal with different fields MiniMate style or
require manual editing. Even if only a few important fields like title,
description and price were editable it would be very useful.

- The ability to review orders. This would display orders between two
dates.

- Update order status. This would all the status field in transactions so
customers would have meaningful information when checking their orders
using the order_status.html page.

- Do basic maintenance on the UserDB (e.g. delete records),

- take the site offline for maintenance and have a offline HTML page
displayed. This could be done with a small change vlink/tlink where it
first checked for a file called, say, /nomvserver.html and displayed it
rather than the hard coded message if the file existed. That would work if
the server is not running. Better would be if the daemon could tell
vlink/tlink that the catalog is not available. This would allow individual
catalogs to be taken offline while keeping the server running.

To support this, I proposed coming a new transactions database. I think it
should be split into two tables, one
for orders and another for order-items that references back to the orders
table. That would only require modifying the report page. Both old and new
report pages could be provided and the databases named differently for
compatability.

I think MiniMate can do some of these things, but is more focused on
catalog and database configuration, plus upload/download. I don't know if
MiniMate for MV4.0 adds more.

I hopes this clarifies the differences between MiniMate and the
non-technical admin interface. I would like to contribute some pages to
this. I guess my question would be: is this of interested to anyone?


> ******    message to minivend-users from cfm@maine.com     ******
>
> On Tue, Feb 29, 2000 at 07:58:54AM -0800, Ed LaFrance wrote:
> > ******    message to minivend-users from Ed LaFrance
> <edlafrance@printexusa.com>     ******
> >
> > I think that all the functions mentioned below are within the
> reach of the
> > standard tag set of Minivend 3.1x, and it is just a matter of
> building the
> > pages.  An "admin" interface like the one described would
> make a really
> > nice addition to the simple demo.
>
> Before you go too far, maybe write some outline specs?  In
> particular consider
> 1) user permissions, directory and file ownership
> 2) arbitrary tables and how to load, display and edit arbitrary fields

> On the face of it, simple, but generalizing is likely to take quite
> a bit of work unless you specify a very specific environment.  All
> the complexity is in the environment and how you generate the pages.
>
>
> $.02
>
> cfm
>
>
> >
> > At 11:09 PM 2/25/00 -0800, you wrote:
> > >******    message to minivend-users from "Christopher Thompson"
> > ><ct@arborinternet.com>     ******
> > >
> > >I think one thing that Minivend seems to be lacking that most other
> > >shopping cart systems have is a non-technical Admin interface to:
> > >
> > >- modify the products database,
> > >- upload/download product images (and other images as well)
> > >- review orders (possibly with link to processor if there is one),
> > >- update order status (plus adding info for the user like
> shipper tracking
> > >codes),
> > >- do basic maintenance on the UserDB (e.g. delete records),
> > >- take the site offline for maintenance and have a offline HTML page
> > >displayed (this would require a change to minivend but would
> be so much
> > >better than that HTML built into vlink/tlink).
> > >
> > >These are really the basic admin functions needed to run an
> online shop.
> > >Put simply: you put a product data record and picture online
> for people to
> > >see, your get orders, and then you provide customer service.
> The products,
> > >transaction and userdb are the three standard databases in
> Minivend. The
> > >other databases (and the userdb to some extent) are really
> optional based
> > >on site requirements.
>
> --
>
> Christopher F. Miller, Publisher
> cfm@maine.com
> MaineStreet Communications, Inc         208 Portland Road,
> Gray, ME  04039
> 1.207.657.5078
http://www.maine.com/
Database publishing, e-commerce, office/internet integration, Debian
linux.
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