Suggestions

I must start by saying that I'm very impressed by the work done on NopCommerce, it is by far one of (if notthe) best open source .net ecommerce solution!

A few suggestions that would be nice to see. (IMHO)

1. Product Types - extension of attributes and specifications where a type has one or many attributes or specifications. i.e A T-Shirt always has Colour, a Book always has an ISBN.

2. Customer search - search by date is not really all that helpful

3. Grouped nav treeview - admin treeview, much like the product treeview constantly on the left. A nice to have on top of that is the ability to group it by category, type or manufacturer.
This would then also allow for context sensitive administration when adding a product under a specific category or manufacturer would add it to that category.

4. Copy product - useful when having similar product ranges.

5. Departments/Cataloges - would be useful for large product ranges -  could ultimately help with sub-branding, range reporting, discount/affiliate/promotion management within each department/catalog

6. (Not a feature as such) Unit tests ;)


More than happy to contribute, though would like to see the data access move to NHibernate to allow for future port of database platforms (just a personal preference). Again, I would happily volunteer some of my time to do the port, providing the authors would be happy with that. :)

Al

Hi Al,

Have you tested porting any areas of nopCommerce to NHibernate yet? If so how difficult/time consuming was this? I would be interested to hear your thoughts on MS's Entity Framework also - although generally the consensus seems to be that it is not yet a serious contender for NHibernate.

Cheers,
Ben

Hi Ben

No, not as of yet, but I can probably have a bit of a play early next week. It would require quite of refactoring and I probably would change how things are done, such as moving the data access away from the provider model in favor of IoC.

I can look at the categories to start off with and start pulling the rest in. The main benefit would be reduction of code base, such as removing a lot of duplication in DataAccess.

I have played with the EF and must say I've found it to be a bit lacking.

Now let me just say I am in no way eluding to there being anything wrong with how things are done now, the architecture is well thought out and the layers are neat. Simply proposing a slightly different way of going about things :)

Regardless, something of this kind of undertaking would require a development branch to run concurrently to the trunk to not hold up the wonderful progress you guys are making. :)

hi all,

I m using LINQ for lot website, and i have gain lot of time with it :)

I have mixed thoughts on using LINQ (or LINQ to SQL for Data Access). It's great for smaller projects and performing tasks like working with XML (saved me a lot of time this week on a WCF project). However, LINQ-to-SQL does couple you tightly to your data model, and more importantly a specific database. Personally I still like to have the control / visibility that manually creating the data access layer / db providers offers. However, I do see great benefit in using ORM tools, particularly porting to alternative database platforms, and the time saving as you mention.

I agree with Ben about Linq2Sql.
Of course, you do not need to use Linq2Sql to be able to use Linq in your application. :)

I'll start looking at updating NopCommerce to NHibernate this week and will probably write a couple of blog posts about the process.

Al

Just a quick update. Sorry for the delay but things have been rather hectic at work.

I've created two quick blog entries about NHibernat'ing Nop. I'm still working on part 3 which will show the actual changes, however these two posts will show my overall thinking and approach.

http://blog.ezsolutions.com.au/post/2009/04/30/NHibernateing-NopCommerce-Part-1-Introduction.aspx
http://blog.ezsolutions.com.au/post/2009/05/07/NHibernateing-NopCommerce-Part-2-Changes-to-come.aspx

Sorry for the delay guys and girls, but I just got back from 3 weeks in the states. I'll try to finish the blog series off over the next week or two.

Al

LINQ for NHibernate has been released, so if you like LINQ there is nothing stopping you from doing so. http://sourceforge.net/projects/nhibernate/files/  :)

I beg to differ about the learning curve. I have used NH at the last few places I've worked and have always been able to ramp up even junior programmers within a few days. It gives you full freedom of architecture, and as long as you don't go crazy with your layers, then the learning curve should be minimal. But then again, that could be said with every architecture ;)