Symphony.

Has anyone had such an experience? If anyone has please provide link and difficulties you ran into.

Thanks in advance

[edited]

We’ve (partially) used Symphony for this website for a local yarn store featuring an online shop (the shop content comes from an imported xml file):

stil-bluete.net (Check out the first navigation tab, “bestellen”.)

All in all I’d say that a lot is possible regarding Symphony-built online shops, but this “a lot” requires a lot of hand coded PHP extras, too.

OriginalTravel uses custom PHP (DS/Events) and a Protx backend.

“Online store” is pretty vague, what specific features do you need? A one-click purchase through Paypal, or a shopping cart with persistence, currency and tax levels, delivery calculation, user registration, login, ordering, payment gateway integration, inventory management, fulfilment management… It’s a broad request ;-)

Depending on what features you need, you might be better using a dedicated store application such as Magento, OSCommerce or Lemonstand.

the closest i’ve used symphony as an online store is with paypal which takes the user to paypal and then bounces them back to the site upon sale completion or cancellation.

Does anyone know if there are any XML/XSLT alternative for store aplication?

As that’s the technology and the fluency I choose Symphony for my projects. It has covered my needs so far but facing a store developnemt i started to think if it is possible to use it or better choose something.

That’s exactly what i need ))

a shopping cart with persistence, currency and tax levels, delivery calculation, user registration, login, ordering, payment gateway integration, inventory management, fulfilment management

The only XSLT e-commerce system I know if is Karova, but I believe their model has changed to single client projects, rather than a licensed product.

Some other shops I’ve been looking at:

• Magento
• OpenCart
• Tradingeye
• PrestaShop

The most promising seems to be Lemonstand. I’ve thought about Symphony integration, and you can write mini views in Lemonstand (“partials”) which, when attached to a page, render HTML. I ran a test the other week and was able to write a partial which outputs the “mini cart” (“Hi Nick, you have 4 items in your basket”) that can be pulled into Symphony with a Dynamic XML Data Source.

This opens the possibility of adding a Lemonstand shop inside a Symphony site.

I’m playing with the idea of setting up an ecommerce site for a personal project, and I’m reluctant to re-invent the wheel by building cart with Symphony. I’d rather leave it to a dedicated application built for the purpose.

Nick you were engaged in developing bulb shop what app did you use then? I thought it was symphony based.

I did UX design and HTML build on Lightbulbs Direct, but it is a bespoke ASP.NET/NHibernate/SQL Server shop.

@ Johanna

(the shop content comes from an imported xml file)

I am curious about the client’s workflow, how does he create that xml file?

• exported rom an ERP application like openerp
• exported as csv from an excel file and then transformed into xml with a xslt template you made
• just handcrafted in a texteditor
• other…

@newnomad: It’s an Access database with a custom XML export macro. It’s imported as dynamic data source. So the workflow is like this:

• Edit the database.
• Export the XML.
• Upload the XML file via ftp.
• Done.

@nickdunn Aha! I found you :P I am going to give this a try for a client so lets tag team this thing! Are you ( or another sympho-pro ) interested in some contract work to make this mashup functional?

Cheers!

I have a cunning plan to try building a shop ensemble with Symphony at some point after the new Members Extension is released. I plan to use the Shopping Cart extension, and the PayPal Payments extension also. I plan to develop some integration for Google checkout and other payment gateways.

I’m looking at Bigcartel too who have an XML API too for a client, but all these things may take a while, lots of research and planning to do. I definitely think it can be done, it’s not something that can be done relitivy quickly in my opinion, but worth doing to show the power of Symphony and it’s extensions API.

Guys we are developping a shop right now, and rather a functional one for our own needs selling smth 5000 - 10000 items

On the whole we are building it in ruby but as an alternative we’are simultaniously making a symphony version as it can be deployed much faster that or main ruby app.

We are ready to share and collaborate on all the things imaginable related to symphony for-the-store using.

I sugest maybe to get teamed up discuss the arcitecture and start doing something as members that’s not the only milestone in this process and it’s obvious for everyone that we’ll get it ready sooner or later. But the sooner WE start making the system the sooner we’ll get ready and aware what we need from members etc.

Let’s discuss, set tasks, create a rep on github and start. That’s my opinion.

Did anyone get any further with LemonStand?

I didn’t use it in the end. What are you trying to do specifically?

Implement a simple shopping cart within Symphony.

Are you wanting to use Symphony and Lemonstand together? If so, I believe you can pull the basket (or mini basket) content from Lemonstand using their pages/partials, and importing them as Dynamic XML data sources into Symphony.

Thanks for your time. I’m not stuck on LemonStand - had only heard independently that it’s good. My goal is to be able to sell products (CDs, for example) on a website that is based on Symphony. Just need basic functionality, trying to ascertain if there’s a simple way to do this while maintaining one admin section, so you wouldn’t need to login to a separate admin section to update product descriptions, for example.

Have you considered something like Foxycart? Its a little more simple to implement, you could manage all of your products in Symphony, but then use them for the actual cart implementation.