[Zope] Zope and e-commerce

[Brad Clements]

On 10 Feb 2005 at 16:03, George Tesseris wrote:

> Is anyone actually having any luck with zope and e-commerce?
> 
> http://www.zope.org/Products/commerce
> isn't really informing and ZCommerce list hasn't been active for a while...
> With wich existing framework I should start?


Ecommerce is trivial with sessions. I don't think you need anything special. I didn't 
when I developed http://www.adirondackcraft.com for a customer.

(I didn't do the graphics)

I use a session, and the Wampum product to charge credit cards.

Product information is stored in Firebird, and full text descriptions are indexed by Zope 
Catalog for searching.


--

Site's a bit old. Maybe we'll add the drag-and-drop shopping cart paradigm folks have 
been gushing about lately. I don't think it's that great, but some folks like it.

--

And some trivia. The home page and the browse products page lists product groups 
(like Art Gallary, Food) then within each of those there is a variable number of product 
categories (fine art, fine crafts, etc)

We did not know in advance how many product categories would be in a group, but the 
customer wanted to show all the groups in a 4 column layout.

So, I needed a "box stacking" algorithm to distribute the product groups (and their 
categories) across 4 columns so that the total height of each column is about the 
same.

I couldn't find a good box stacking method, so I wrote a genetic algorithm that 
determines that layout every few weeks (the number of product categories rarely 
changes).


Unfortunately the product groups aren't alphabetical, but the customer is satisfied with 
the look.

Isn't Python great!


-- 
Brad Clements,                bkc at murkworks.com   (315)268-1000
http://www.murkworks.com                          (315)268-9812 Fax
http://www.wecanstopspam.org/                   AOL-IM: BKClements