Building a new shop

I will shortly be developing a shop for a client using nopcommerce and have a few questions about the best approach to take in terms of adding new functionality/modifying existing functionality. My goals are:

1. to be able to provide a fully customised solution for the client.
2. to keep any changes to nopcommerce source code/projects to an absolute minimum to facilitate upgrades.

I like the idea of isolating all new code in a plugin but I do not know if this is possible eg I know I will want to change existing nopcommerce controllers/views and probably change the database - can this be achieved via a plugin?

I would really appreciate hearing from people who have faced this development decision and how they went about solving it and the issues encountered.

Many thanks.

Hello Skugzee

Welcome ! :)

No at the moment, the Plugin Engine doesn't allow the developer the stuff you mentioned, but I know the nopCom team are working to make the Plugin Engine more flexible.

Your first point does not tell us much, can you elaborate a little on what you mean by 'fully customisable'.

For ease of code development and management (makes things easier when time comes for upgrades), I would recommend you set up Mercurial, I use these guys. A fellow developer persuaded me about 7 months ago to use Mercurial, and I've been so pleased that I listened to him. :)

re:
...change existing nopcommerce controllers/views

You can create your own Themes as per this doc

Hi guys,

Thanks for getting back so promptly.

In terms of customisation I am thinking of adding new pages/areas  to cater for client-specific needs - the client in question is an insurance company so they will want the shop to integrate with areas of their existing quotation site so I am keen to know if in general terms if there is  the flexibility in nopcommerce to bolt on these sorts of business-specific functionality and if so what the best way forward would be?

It is possible, but you'll have to add new controllers and classes to accommodate the extra functionality. I take it you're familiar with MVC ?

Hi,

Yes familiar with mvc but not extending nopcommerce and the best way to go about it.

Awesome. All your data (domain) side of things would go into the Nop.Data / Nop.Core Projects, and everything front end would go into the Nop.Web project.

Everything else, is like a regular MVC application. :)

As far as providing you customer with a fully custom solution; nopCommerce is a great place to start (base/framework), but the customizing comes from you the implementer.

I would recommend keeping as much of your custom HTML and scrips in your own custom Plugins/Extensions (you maintain the rights and sale price). I would recommend releasing a free/lite version of it back to the community though so we can all marvel/improve on your genius.

Only modify what you have to in the "core".  You can extend almost any custom Entity Set into the existing framework(2.50).  See the docs section for detailed information on this.