Hello,
Basically i have developed some applications and what i will be selling will be offered as a digital download. I will be also offering maintenance plans to enable clients to obtain the new versions of the software plus support.
The current roadmap says these two will be in upcoming releases
•Web Services API for easy integration between nopCommerce and any third-party applications
•Recurring orders, subscription based products
Will these allow me to do what i propose?? Initially i was going to write my web site in ASP.NET but needed a shopping cart, and nopcommerce offered everything i needed EXCEPT integration with my applications. Then i saw the above mentioned in the roadmap.
So how i would like to do this is a customer buys a license for say 10 concurrent users. This entitles them for a year of updates and support. They will need to renew the maintenance plan (i guess this would be another product linked to the software) in order to get updates and support.
The site will need to allow them to download the software and generate a license file (custom file which i have code to generate). The client will then need to register the system service the first time it is run (to my web site running nopcommerce), and every time the system service checks for updates, it must check the web site to see if the license is valid to receive updates (i.e. maintenance plan is currently active). The order on the download page must also be linked to the latest version of the software prior to the maintenance plan running out (i.e if they bought v1.20 of the software and the current version is 1.50, but the maintenance plan ended after the released of 1.40, then the download link needs to point to 1.40 version of the software).
Will this be possible in nopcommerce when the above mentioned features are built into nopcommerce. If not, i shall write by own web services that i will release independently (but located in the same directory) as nopcommerce. However i will need to know how the database tables are linked and the documentation is not complete. I may possibly have to figure it out on my own (not too difficult but just time consuming). The other downfall is that if the structure changes due to upgrades, i may need to change the web service.
Can there be a method to link a maintenance plan with an application and make sure that it consist with versions released as i plan to do??
I'd also like to build in some other features, perhaps it might be best to add extra pages because i wish to have a page which shows the status of services that i plan to offer in the future.
If i was to write extra pages for my own functionality, could someone tell me which masterpage i should be using to get the same look and feel of the nopcommerce site??
Also, does anyone know a site that has templates for nopcommerce v1.20??
I hope the suggestions help in making nopcommerce a better product and i hope that someone can help with the questions i have asked.
