[TYPO3] tt_products, poor documentations, no support

[Ernesto Baschny [cron IT]]

Ali - schrieb am 02.01.2006 18:21:

> It is well known that Typo3 is a powerful CMS which comes at the cost of
> complexity. However, I believe, the system is no more complex than any
> other APIs around. Despite being around and popular for many years, what
> makes it complex is its poor documentation, particularly for newbies.

You are talking about the documentation of tt_product? I haven't really
used it that much, but I can see a rather comprehensive documentation on
that piece of code:
http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/tt_products/

> I have asked this question previously in this group with no replies yet:
> 
> - How is it possible to have products and product categories, as
> records, in a HMENU object?
> Having this feature as a standard part of the shopping system seems
> standard to me and it is odd that this feature is not built in the
> extension.

I have just taken a quick look at the documentation and found this:

http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/tt_products/Adminstration-d4d372df6a/

Skip to the "Handling of Categories" part. There are some comments here:

"If you want to make bigger shops with multiple categories you shall
install the mbi_products_categories and maybe also the nsb_cat2menu
extension."

About the "nsb_cat2menu" part I have already commented this in another
response in this thread. mbi_products_categories is not documented,
maybe because its "plug-and-play" (haven't tried it)?

About the documentation and your complaints, I must agree with Elmar:
you cannot force any open source developer to document anything. And
stating that some open source code which is not documented is a "piece
of useless junk for the rest of people" is not necessarily true. For
some people the source *is* the documentation. Some people from the open
source scene have the philosophy of "release early, release early",
which surely will generate some releases without documentation. This is
how open source works. Maybe its not the way you are used to, but it
does work, I can guarantee. :)

Elmar asked you what you have contributed to the community, but I think
this is totally irrelevant to the discussion and only serves to heat up
the discussion even more. It doesn't matter how much or in which form
you have contributed, you simply shouldn't make any demands to some open
source developer, unless you have made a contract with him that
something has to be delivered (for money or whatever other means). Other
than that, every open source developer only has a contract with himself
and can deliver whatever he wants.

Cheers,
Ernesto