nopCommerce 1.8 roadmap. Let's discuss.

this is looking really  good, will be great to get the VAT side of things nailed once and for all - hopefully discounts too :)

May as well have my say.

Mine are just architectural suggestions - have made these already Andrei, but to reiterate

1) If we are using POCOs and not the entity framework generated classes, then lets go code first (part of EF CTP4) and do away with the EDMX. Development should be domain driven, not database driven.

2) Implement the repository pattern, as now the business layer is tightly coupled with data access. We've gone from one extreme (bloated provider model where people could add their own database specific providers, but probably wouldn't want to) to another (simplified data access where people may want to implement their own data access layer (say L2S, NH, Subsonic or even back to classic ADO.NET and Stored Procs) but can't).

3) Implement dependency injection. Believe me, this does make development easier and makes your application more testable. If you were looking at using a different data access technology, and you had implemented the repository pattern, and you were using DI, you could migrate each repo one by one rather than all or nothing. My preference, StructureMap. And regarding pluggable architectures, it doesn't get much better than StructureMap's assembly scanning capabilities. Just drop in a dll containing a plugin and your application can load it and use it.

4) Testing, testing, testing. nopCommerce is becoming quite a large application and yet to this day we do not have even one unit test. Yes the community will help submit bugs when they are found but we need to make sure that nopCommerce is tested as well as it can be before a new version is released and people start upgrading.

5) More frequent releases. Why not release new versions more frequently, especially when bugs have been found and fixed. There is nothing wrong with releasing a new minor version that just contains a couple of bug fixes and maybe a single new feature. I think people would rather have this than wait months for each release.

Okay, those are my suggestions.

It's great that the community has so many suggestions for new features but for me, these are the points that should be addressed.

mikeal7 wrote:
It's quite easily to customize. Just return an appropriate value (PageSslProtectionEnum.No) of "SslProtected" property of a page

nopCommerce team | retroviz wrote:
Thanks a lot for these architectural suggestions. I agree with some of them. Some of them needs some investigation and a lot of work (the main idea is to keep development as simple as possible). I've just created a work item for these tasks.

1.  NOP needs a print solution that does not require full trust.  Perhaps just a clean, printer friendly HTML page.

2.  Tag cloud.

I was wondering if there are any plans to add an Ajax type add to cart feature in future releases? If there is one thing that bugs me about shopping online is that when I hit the add to cart button it takes me directly to the checkout page. This is like being in a supermarket and everytime I put something in my shopping cart I am automatically transported to the checkout lane... I'm not done shopping yet! The continue button in nopCommerce cart seems to take you back to the home page, not to the product or cateory you were on - so that is no help. Now you have to find your way back to the "aisle" that you were in and try to figure out where you left off!!

I'm currently implementing this (with some success) in my nopCommerce installation using the included jQuery script that comes with nopCommerce. I've had to do a lot of customization and figured it may be easier to do this with ASP.NET update panels integrated into the whole system, but I have little experience with those and it seems like it would be a great hassle for me to do this integration myself.

So for now I'm using jQuery's post and load to add items to my cart without having to be taken to the cart. I use the post to add the items to my cart without leaving the page that I'm on and I use the load to update the minishoppingcart box without having to refresh the page. I'm also working the wishlist the same way.

It would be nice if this was integrated into a future release. I'm sure that not everyone wants this ability, but it would be nice as an option in the admin section to choose to have the cart behave in this manner.

Thanks

B

Re: The forum software. And this is coming from working with these forums. I don't know if the forums do this or not, but if somebody replies to a forum thread include the response in the email. I am watching this thread for example. I get the same email each time. And I have to click over to the forum to read each one. If the response that was posted was in the email I would know whether it was something I cared about or not. Most of these issues I don't care about.

Or at least make it a user choice/option to have the response included in the email.

Is fractional product order quantities, along with mapping of factional quanties to local strings, on the roadmap?

We sell yardage and the customer understand 1/8, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 5 1/2 etc.  It is difficult to sell 1/2 yard quantities and request the customer to purchase 2 units to get a yard.  If the order quanity and stock quanity were a float value and the enabling mechanism provided a fractional limit, in our case .250 for increments of a 1/4 yard, we would need some way to translate .25 to 1/4, .5 to 1/2, 2.75 to 2 3/4 etc.  The user could translate the fraction value to string representation similar to other LocaleStringResource.  I would expect many applications where items are sold by weight and length that would benefit from this addition.

Thanks
R. Land

There are 2 more important features that should be added in upcioming versions...

1) Adding pages from admin section that requires login

2) Upgrading capability of Access Control List to make it work for public store too. By which admin can give control of public pages to customers on the bases of roles..

I would like to know if you have in program to improve the navigation over product category filtered by manufacturers .. i mean you select the manufactuer and then navigate the product category and product filtered on this manufactures (double filter: on category and on manufatures)..
I think it would be a great improvement in navigation, also because we can show a kind of matrix navigation: manufactures on the top menu (in fashion market manufactures could be collection ) and category on the left menu.

Thanks
  Davide