[Trellis-developers] ecommerce

[Shaddy Zeineddine]

Ecommerce is still a lacking area of Trellis. The truth is that most
current and future clients do not have a need for ecommerce in their
learning center so it hasn't been a priority. For these reasons, it is
hard to justify the inclusion of ecommerce in trellis as a core feature.

I think we should consider taking an existing ecommerce solution and
integrating it with trellis through a plugin. I know James is somewhat
familiar with ZenCart (oscommerce branch), and I was happy to hear the
latest version will require php 5.2 (just like us). I have not looked
into integration very much, but it is something to consider.

Basically the plugin will need to provide the methods we would use to
complete transactions without needing the zencart user interface, we can
also forward users to zencart for purchasing and sync our catalog with
zencart. This would probably mean management of ecommerce would be done
using zencart, administrators can be forwarded to the interface and user
accounts can be auto generated from trellis. We can customize the look
to match our admin site, it doesnt have to be an exact match, but it
should feel familiar.

If we can integrate trellis with a third party ecommerce program, it
will be easy to offer advanced functionality to our clients who request
it. And for the rest, we will have one less chunk of code to worry about.

Any thoughts?