Hierachical category navigation

we are evaluating nopcommerce for some time and where looking at the 1.4 beta version.
Nopcommerce is great but we miss some basic functions.
wit 20+ years of software development in all languages except c# we've deciced last week to go for a big change.

step 1: learn c#, which is easy with so many years of experience.
step 2: create functionality we needed

Main feature we and our relations where missing is hierachical category navigation.we've created a new control for this that allows a horizontal dropdown navigation for your categories (up to three levels)
layout is done via stylesheet and dynamic html is used in combination with javascript

next change:
When selling many kind of products (categories) a campaign function is nice but we needed the ability to send a campaign only to customers that bought one or more  products from a main category (ardware is different than software)
this would be not an add on but needed core and database changes.
ok, we did it and therefore will not follow future updates anymore but continue with our custom version.

next change:
the topics are not a real cms feature since the links needs to be coded in the pages or content.
again we created a usercontrol that allow you to show the links where you want.
next week we will make it also multi level with dropdown menu (Like our category navigation) so we have something like real cms functionality.

next enhancement:
we create a win app application to easy retrieve and localize the resourcestring and create an languagepack xml.
our relations are french and dutch so we realy need it.


this post is not to critize the work that has been done by the team since they did a lot of good work and built a good applicaiton however in our professional target group of clients we are using tis for we need more.

if anyone is interested in more details or code, send me an email ([email protected] )since i cant upload anyting to te post here.

Peter

PS: my h key on the keyboard is broken so you migt miss a few here and there

Peter, your topics usercontrol sounds useful, I just tried emailing you but it bounced back, any chance you can share the code/usercontrol ?

thanks :)

Hi,

I just came across your post on the NopCommerce forum detailing the amendments you are making to it.

We are currently evaluating/starting development on it and are starting to come up with the same issues as you.

I have had to code the new topic menus in and have creating  controls for that sort of thing on my to do list.

As you say, once you start amending the code for it updating with new versions of Nop is not really an option anymore.

I have seen posts that say a new release may be out soon so may hold out for that for our implementation.

I have posted about the exception handling on the forum and would be interested to hear your take on that as try and catches are few and far between in it.

Keep up the good work

I'm hoping to get my major changes into the official code base for exactly the reasons you describe (ease of future upgrades) but also to give something back and help this product become mature. It seems to me there needs to be a clear way to submit patches and a guarantee that submissions will be considered and accepted if they're up to scratch and useful. Fingers crossed!