Suggestions for Enterprise Addition

A more pluggable architecture would a huge attraction for nopCommerce.  For example if you want to alter the markup you basically have to pull apart all the user controls which makes upgrading a nightmare. I don't know how many of you have worked with Umbraco but Umbraco does this soooo sooo well.  Would be awesome if you could create masterpages in nopCommerce and then apply the elements you needed.

Moving nopCommerce to ASP.NET MVC would make things like theming so much easier. Since views (pages) are loaded by a ViewEngine, I created a theming solution where you can create the theme with just a master page and css. Then if you wish to change one of the existing views (page) in the site, rather than modifying it directly, you take a copy of it and drop it into your theme directory. The next time you run the app it will run your themed version instead of the standard. This makes the process of upgrading much much easier as providing your model has not changed, everything just works.

That said it would be A LOT of work t move nop to mvc as the whole architecture would need to change.

so perhaps there is a better theming solution we can use for web forms...

While MVC is in theory 'better' or 'cleaner', it is not necessarily 'easy' to mod against. I've developed against Joomla CMS for example (a good example of packaging modules by and by) and I'd say 90% of developers would rather use traditional methods vs. MVC. It is just a whole lot more code (which equates to a lot more hours charged to clients) to do the same end result. I completely understand the theory of MVC being cleaner, but it is a horror show to juggle if you are doing just simple, straight-forward modules. Just my 2 cents.

Lubidius wrote:

Hi besides the fact that Joomla is not a .NET application, I think if you used ASP.NET MVC you would enjoy it and find it easier to develop than standard web forms.

It's a big learning curve for web forms guys I agree but the fact that you are keeping your views (pages) as simple as possible and moving your logic to your controllers make it much easier to develop the presentation layer.

Remember MVC is just a design pattern and Joomla is just an application (in another language) built on these patterns. Don't let this put you off ASP.NET MVC.

As I said in my previous post, it would be a big job to change to an MVC application. I recommend you have a look at http://www.asp.net/mvc

P.S. Also check out http://www.hanselman.com/blog/2010SurveyResultsWhatNETFrameworkFeaturesDoYouUse.aspx - will give you some idea of how things are shaping up in the .NET community.

Hi Ben,

Wow, moving nopcommerce to a MVC framework would be really good, as I have worked with several recent projects all using MVC and the design control is amazing, the compliance of the site is also good.

You are right tho it would be extremly hard and time consuming to move nopcommere to MVC, but it would be worth it :)

Support for ASP.Net MVC is really growing now..

mike..

Thanks for suggestions. I plan to publish nopCommerce 1.6 roadmap within next several days.

Regarding moving to MVC. I think that it's too early because there're a lot of customers using nopCommerce with IIS 6 and Windows 2003. And most hosting companies doesn't allow users to set up extensionless URLs (with IIS 6).

Andrei,

I agree not all hosting providers will allow you to make the changes required for extensionless URLs - however, you can still run ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 with no server configuration changes - just by changing your routes to use aspx