[ic] Interchange 6: Status report and roadmap

[Paul Jordan]

> > That's just a start, so the following steps are:
> >
> > * Carts and wishlists from the database
> > * Remove single item from cart
> > * Checkout procedure
> > * Documentation on recommended database structure
> >
> 
> I would like to add Category & Navigation structure, which will roughly based on the
> tables we are using for WellWell:
> 
> http://git.icdevgroup.org/?p=wellwell.git;a=tree;f=database/pgsql
> 
> categories
> product_categories
> menus
> 
> Maybe we should merge categories and menus, what do you think?


 

I don't use any of that from Standard, nor will in the new IC so I don't know if what I am saying holds true to the actual data and how it is used. I glanced at it and it looks very similar.

I would agree with Racke that as an efficient end solution, it is a better concept to store things like menus and categories into conformed "views" or "relationships" table(s). However, well-integrated structures can probably be more formidable for new people to grasp and "hack". The more one thing is tied to another increases the intimacy you need to have before you can create change.

So as the developer for a store, I would say great. But as the developer of many other apps, I'd say it may have made things harder for me when I was new. Seasoned devleopers can work with it, but is a demo being built for the seasoned developer?

Since these two particular things happen to already be so similar, if I had to vote I would say combine them, but with caution. I would not want the spirit of the Demo to move towards high brow, highly integrated structures. Demo needs to be on the ITL comfort level, which is to say a lot of integrated perl and sophisticated table structures might be a bad idea. The Demo is to help new users to grasp the concepts of Interchange, not the concepts of splitting-hairs efficiency and conformity or perl or databases.

In the begining, the Demo in many ways served as my documentation, and that needs to be easy to grasp. 

If the Devgroup itself was going to design and run a eStore service, like Volusion, then of course, the more efficient the better.


Paul