My sole experience with ASP.NET was creating some simple websites (not projects)
using controls and tying them to Entity model and SQL data sources using all the inbuilt wizards etc.
So I kind of felt like an impotent chimp when I opened up the nopCommerce source, the levels of inheritance between
pages, controls, feature specific classes and master business logic classes etc. is a little more than I can bare with my limited knowledge. The $20 guide as I understand covers the administration settings and data importing/backing up etc. and does not actually explain the relationships and workings of the application on the source code level ?
its a very powerful, modular and feature rich app no doubt, but there's just a bunch of little changes that I absolutely
must make in order for it to become of use to me and it's the seeming difficulty of implementing those changes
that will probably leave me with no choice other than to adopt some mass consumed solution like ZenCart instead which has modules and config scripts for nearly everything/everywhere.
If you can please answer any one or more of the following questions that you may know the answer to. I especially need to make some shipping, registration/address country specific changes. I am in Australia.
1. I need to add a "suburb" field to the new user registration form and the rest of site, we have postcodes here in Australia that cover up to 5 suburbs or so. So it's important for the suburb to be specified and printed on the address label. Which files should I be concerned with besides CustomerRegister.ascx/cs? Say I pull a "copy cat" with changed ID and LocaleResourceString on the ""txtStreetAddress2" etc. across all the files will that get me a working field ? I presume I will also need to update the database tables on my sqlserver as I don't want to re-install everything from fresh if I let the install/scripts/*.sql files do it ? A dynamic suburb field would be ideal of course, if it could use some page method/webservice to match the postcode to a suburb(s) and let the user choose his one if more than one.
2. A shipping module that works around postcode ranges! The ones included by default are very limited and of course would give the same shipping cost to all buyers regardless of location in Australia. I can use the Australia post class as it does this, but then again I have different prices in mind and use a courier service. Maybe I can hax0r the Australia post shipping module :(
3. I am using PayPal standard payments, but in NopCommerce admin settings for this module I could only find a static " Additional fee:" option that can be specified in whole dollars and that's that. Kind of silly if you want people to pay a surcharge for using credit card/pay pal as amounts paid will vary. I of course wish to specify a percentage ie: 2.0% off the final total, this shouldn't be too hard should it? Any tips on how to change payment module code to do this?
4. I wish to change the strings: "Tax" and "including Tax" that can be seen in the summary on check-out. To GST and including GST. LocaleResourceString datasource again?
5. I get errors if I try to use any of PDF convert/create features like "invoice PDF", the error is as follows: Request for the permission of type 'System.Security.Permissions.SecurityPermission, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed. What's that all about? This feature never worked for me even when I tried diff ver. of nopcommerce on another server. Do i need a plug-in or something? or different permissions to execute this on the server?
6. Importing products: Surely there must be a smarter way to go about it than just copy and pasting
corresponding fields off the suppliers excel/csv product sheets into fields on an empty nopcommerce excel template?
Is there like an application that one can program that you can assign the relationship to between fields from various suppliers sheets and the nopcommerce standard where this application will read/scan those files and pull the necessary field data out and arrange into nop compatible format?
7. I see a lot of storefronts have live stock levels and prices that they grab from suppliers xml files, so using RSS or whatever it's called. Is anything similar available in nopcomemrce where it can link up to such files ?
8. Lastly I do realize this is a lot of questions to some of which the solution may require some quite advanced coding and I will probably not get all the answers I seek from this forum as it's not exactly swarming with users nor noob oriented. Can you people recommend some good asp.net forums/irc channel where noob questions get fast answers and where people are familiar with nopcommerce? Lastly any particular book I can pick up to use as reference and or that orientates around building a demo storefont project with a simplified yet similar architecture/patten approach?
Much appreciated....