RE: [mv] Preview of Akopia Interchange

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

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

I think the dual nature of Minivend was well served with a basic catalog
template and a full featured catalog template. And I think the new UI is
just what the full featured catalog has been needing. Here is my proposal
for continuing with a dual mode path:


The Basic Catalog is a bare bones template with the following features:

- Basic database tables/fields. For example the Products database would
only have code, category, title, description, price, weight. Minimal
fields in UserDB to support sign-in and simple order processing. Minimal
fields in Transactions to support simple order processing.

- Basic pages. No frames. Home page, results page, flypage, basket,
feedback, checkout, report/receipt, plus special pages. Just enough to
show the basic features in a unformated presentation.

- Basic features. The standard shipping, pricing, tax tables available,
but set to default values or left empty.

- User interface. I may get some disagreement from some, but a minimal
user interface, a la Minimate, would be a good inclusion. In looking at
the Interchange interface, I think that basic versions of the Order
viewer, Data Table browser, Page editor would be good inclusions. Also the
basic daemon restart/status like in Minimate would make sense. This user
interface would simply be a subset of the full UI feature set. Perhaps it
could be broken into lib/UI/uicore.cfg and lib/UI/uifull.cfg.


The Interchange Catalog would have a defined minimum database table layout
and would include additional config and lib files to add functionality.

- All database tables/fields needed to support advanced Interchange
features.

- All pages needed to support advanced Interchange features.

- Complete Interchange user interface. One thing I liked in the preview is
the Control Panel like interface with all of the interface features
listed. It would be great if this had a _plug-in_ type interface. I think
where ever possible, enable _plug-in_ type interfaces to allow the
community to extend the feature set. Minivend did not fully lend itself to
extensions. I have created a number of specific UI pages that others might
use, but they would be difficult to implement because of the lack of a
standard interface.


I would use both the Basic and full Interchange catalogs in different
situations. I also think implementing some _plug-in_ interfaces (e.g. for
UI or UserTags) would allow a grateful community to contrubute more than
just bug fixes to Interchange.



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