[TYPO3-commerce] Commerce: a big disappointment

[ingo schmitt]

Hi Dmitry,

> (Mainly to developers of Commerce)
> 

As I'm part of the core developer of commerce, I try to answer to your 
points here.

> Hi!
> 
> I will need a shop extension soon for my own company. Naturaly I went to 
> look to a fresh shinhing Commerce extension. Well, it seems like it 
> cannot be really used except than by developers or people who are 
> willing to spend hours to find how to work with it :(

Did you had a look in the doc/commerce_quickinstall.txt ?

> 
> Normally extension should have either very intuitive interface or at 
> least a tutorial to understand how to work with it. I could not find 
> either. I tried making pages for each plugin type to see if it displays 
> anything. I could not select any of default templates because template 
> selector does not let to select from extensions (TemplaVoila, for 
> example, allows it). So I had to copy those to fileadmin. Well... You 
> know how "good" it is for regular user without Quickplorer extension.
> 
> Than I went for configuration of "Product Listing". It wants a "Details 
> page" but there is no plugin named "Details" or anything. How I am 
> supposed to figure out what to put there? What is "Number pages 
> (Pagebrowser)" is supposed to mean? It is just not in English! "show 
> Pagebrowser" (why with small "s"?) does not do anything: page browser is 
> always displayed... Looks like someone programmed something in a big 
> hurry with much care. Would you imagine sucgh style in typo3 core? Never 
> ever.
> 
> Next I wanted to create a product. I want to create a photographic shop. 
> So I need to specify thumbnail and available image sizes. After watching 
> a podcast I got an idea that I need to use attributes. Well, ok, I 
> created "Image sizes" attribute. But what am I supposed to do next? I 
> could select it in "Shall" (and save form) but nothing happens after 
> that. How am I supposed to specify these image sizes or put thumbnail? 
> No wizards to help me making a product...
> 
> Sorry guys, may be you made a good extension for yourself and your 
> clients. But it is completely unusable if one wants to install and do 
> something quickly with it. And there is no manual.
> 
> I do not want to offend you, possibly it works very well for you. But it 
>  will be problematic for many others to use it unless you do something 
> to make it more user friendly. At least, write a manual.

I think you are right, concerning the manual and the HCI thinks in the 
backend in the COMMERCE Module, there ist a lot to improve.
We know this issue and we are working on it. But currently we are all 
working on customer projects, where we are earning mony to make our 
living from it. So the work on COMMERCE is currently done in our spare 
time, as we can afford ist. We do have a clear policy to document every 
new or changed thing in the currentyl very smal manual, but it's growing 
  week by week.

We are currently looking for a sponsorship to have the possibility to 
work on the manual and the missing "features" in commerce. We think a 
complete and good manual would be quite huge job, so we need at least a 
sponsoring of 2000,-- Euro, we havn't raised 5% of it yet.
http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=5456

If someone is willing to write this manual, he or she is still invited 
to Duesseldorf or Hamburg to get the complete support from Volker or me 
to implement a shop and write a manual. Just raise your hands..

Improvements in COMMERCE are welcomed, we are following the list and the 
bugtracker, so normally there should be a fast response at least by 
Volker or me. Karsten is very active here and giving us patcheas for the 
COMMERCE core. Thank you for those realy usefull patches :-)








  >
> By the way, typo3-commerce.org says that it cannot connect to the 
> database. Looks significant...

Yes, this is also postponed, since we have customer jobs to work for. 
Maybe i shold point the www pointer to the doc.typo3-commerce.org page :-/

> 
> Anyone have an idea about other good shop extension for typo3?
> 


ingo

Mit freundlichen Gruessen
-- 
Ingo Schmitt                        mailto:is at marketing-factory.de
Marketing Factory Consulting GmbH   http://typo3.marketing-factory.de/
Content Management mit Typo3: Beratung - Schulung - Realisierung