Thread

Hi all,

So, I’m looking for some advice from veterans. Over the course of the past month, I’ve just grown attached to not only the fabulous software provided by EllisLab’s—but its close-knit and innovative community. As such, I’d like to use either CI or EE for a shopping cart I’ll be building once my other projects are completed.

My inquiry to all who might have experience, is which would be the better choice? I don’t know much about EE, besides that has been written by the same folks who wrote CI. That alone is enough for me to justify spending $249 for a commercial license. I also noticed that they do have an ecommerce module available. Perhaps I can further customize it etc. I’m not worried about support, I’ve yet to be disappointed with help from the CI community and this is open source. I can only imagine what paid support gets you.

Anyway, I lack experience in building a shopping cart, but I’m ready for the next big venture and think I’m technically capable of handling the challenge.

Looking forward to hearing some feedback from the kind folks here.

Cheers all and enjoy your weekend!

- sf

If you are technical capable, and don’t have an immediate timeframe, I say save your money and go with CI. Not only will it prove to be a valuable learning experience but you can achieve exactly the results you are looking for.

With EE, I’m afraid you will be fighting against a lot of the features implemented within a standard CMS system
that you may not need. I’ve never personally used EE, or any of it’s modules, but I am a penny-pincher. If I can do it for free - why spend the money?

Hi Mike!

Thank you for the reply.

The project isn’t for a client, it’s a personal family based eComm site. My father runs a jewelry store and I’d like to give him a web presence. Since there isn’t a said deadline, I can actually enjoy developing the site and learn/add it to my profile, which would ultimately be more rewarding to me than anything else. My only concern is security ofcourse. Although CI appears to be very secure in its current form, me adding code to it without having a peer review can be quite frightening.

With that said, I definitely want to see if I can pull off writing it on my own. Designing the database might be a pain in the butt, but hey, it needs to get done. Wish I can design it myself, but that’s definitely not one of my strong points. Will ultimately need to have a friend do it for me.

Security really shouldn’t be much of an issue at all. For the most part, store a user’s cart in a session, when it comes time to check out do a quick database insertion to store their cart and the relevant information (shipping address, etc).

I assume you’d be using a third-party to process credit cards (Paypal, 2Checkout, etc.) - they all have excellent tutorials and APIs that will allow you to simply define a price and pass the user on to their secure server to process their credit card information.

This way, you aren’t responsible at all for the security of their private information (CC#). Once the user pays, via the payment portal, they are passed back to a URL you specify and you can further process the order (a flag marking that they have paid successfully) and get it ready for shipping (in an admin interface or something similar).

Heh, man! I’m getting excited to just build the thing. I should start garnering ideas on how and what to put into an admin interface as well as the rest of the site. Will be a huge project considering the only thing I’ll probably outsource is the XHTML/CSS.

Hardest part, believe it or not, is getting decent photos of the jewelry. That’s always been the bottleneck that prevented us from bringing the store online.

I have a paypal library (modified it for CI, not my baby) if you need it. I would be happy to share.

Hardest part, believe it or not, is getting decent photos of the jewelry. That’s always been the bottleneck that prevented us from bringing the store online.

Get a decent single-reflex digital camera with a macro lense. A macro lense allows you to frame in closely on small objects. For jewelry and other small objects like integrated circuits, I use a Nikon D100 with a 105mm micro Nikkor. Nikon also sells a 55mm micro nikkor and a 200mm unit (the latter is a bit much for jewelry). Other camera manufacturers have their own solutions and there are always third-party lenses.

I would use at least two flash units with umbrellas positioned equal-distant from the object on both sides of the camera. You need to synchronize the two flash units to fire off at the same time (while the shutter is open). Visit a camera shop and ask for advice on this because there are numerous ways of handling flash synchronization. Some flash units have a mode where they can be slaved off another flash unit either electronically or via a flash cord.

Decide on a background material. Something like velvet or velvetine would be nice for jewelry, but you might prefer to use other background materials. Using a fabric is usually better because you can hide the props that supportthe jewelry under the fabric. You can add variety by using different color fabrics for different shots. Your probably going to need to prepare some props to hold the jewelry in place during your shooting sessions. Short pieces of plexiglass rods of varying sizes could be used to handle this need. You could slip these under the background material and use them to prop up the jewelry. Ask questions in a PM if you need more information. I did a lot of this in another life.

esra -

Thank you kindly for your feedback. I’m going to be looking into purchasing a new camera for this task. I’ll need to coach my father/brother on the proper etiquette to jewlery photography according to the tidbits of information I pick up such as these. Ultimately we’re looking to put photos on a white background, the same style bluenile.com and many other of big boys use.

My designer started working on a template for me, what do you think?

http://www.ryanscherf.net/dev/gregs.png

- sf

I have a paypal library (modified it for CI, not my baby) if you need it. I would be happy to share.

Hey thanks!  I’d definitely be interested at taking a look at the library and catering it for my needs.

If you don’t mind, my personal e-mail address is .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Cheers!

- sf

The template looks great - a good start to what should be a really fun project.

If you don’t mind me asking - who’s the designers, URL?

Hi Mike -

Ryan Scherf is a personal friend of mine who I know exclusively from the internet, as funny as it seems. We both are volunteers running an EFnet IRC server together. He’s one of the few designers I know who has that contemporary touch to his work, and fits well into the entire “web 2.0” niche.

He’s usually up for doing side projects when he isn’t booked up with his full time job. I already tried stealing him to come work at Lime Group with me, but he can’t relocate to Manhattan. 😊

If you feel like contacting him, he has a form on http://ryanscherf.net that will go directly to his personal e-mail. Feel free to tell him you were referred by zuez/Steve and he’ll definitely respond.

Cheers!

- sf

Just to add to this.  If the payment gateway you want is paypal, then the EE simplecommerce module may well save you lots of time.  If you’re looking for credit card stuff, then the full ecommerce module isn’t out yet, and truthfully, you’d probably be better of building it in CI.

I’m (obviously) a huge CI proponent, but man… EE is sweet.  If you are a CI developer and you do a lot of client work, then do yourself a favour and download the free EE and spend a weekend getting comfortable with EE.  It can/will save you massive amounts of time on most projects.  I’ve addressed this before, but for me the rule of thumb is
a) does the client want to maintain the site themselves
b) is the site a “standard” sitewith features similar to 90% of the stuff out there
c) is this a commercial project
d) might I need support (EE support kicks ass)
e) is there time pressures to get this done

If I answer yes to the above, then I go EE… its a no brainer.  Where CI rocks is for
- particularly data-intensive apps
- apps that you want ultra fine control over (any CMS needs to make some generalizations for you)
- you’ll be distributing the application
- its your app, and you want to play

Sometimes a site or app will fall somewhere in the middle, and then the tie breaker is license restrictions and costs.

Hi Derek! 😊

Thank you kindly for the reply.

I was hoping to go as ‘light’ as possible with my back-end, simply because as time is passing, I’m slowly moving away from full-time systems/network engineering to web development as this is where my passion has always been. I’m worried if I jump into a full blown CMS, I might not learn as much, etc. What I would ultimately love to have, is the support EE has to offer. With that said, I’ve never had a question go unanswered for longer than twenty four hours in the CI forums.

My coding style and my general principle for approaching everyday programming problems has changed dramatically because of CI and its community. I’d like to stay loyal to EllisLabs and give EE a shot with the ecommerce shop.

I think I’d benefit using EE again with the support it comes with, plus ofcourse, having a platform powered by the same engineers as code igniter. More importantly, Derek, open source shops such as Zen Cart are constantly in the lime light for vulnerabilities. Is there anything else besides that where EE would shine above ZenCart/CI if I decide to build a jewelry store with it? Templates and all should be rather simple to pop in I’d imagine?

- sf

I’ve not used ZenCart, so I can’t speak fully to this, but in general, software written for one specific goal (ie: a “Store”, or a “photo galley”, or “newsletter”) will generally be more featureful (but as you point out not more secure) then an app written for multi-purposes.  Where EE really excels here is the integration.  If your store suddenly wanted forums, a gallery, a newsletter, and a custom back end “peer review” functionality, EE could pick this up and run with it without missing a step.  I doubt ZenCart could (but don’t know for sure).

As for CI’s differences vs EE, these are two different animals.  In theory, CI could be used to build an app like EE (we’ve publicly stated that we’re moving in this direction).  So what EE really offers is complete, written, tested, bug free and supported features that you’d otherwise need to write yourself in CI.

Cool Derek!

I should probably move this conversation over to the EE forum. Sounds like for this one particular project it might be beneficial for me to pickup a commercial license. (At least, that’s probably the license I’ll need for an ecommerce jewelry store.)

Just curious, say I needed a way to start tracking conversion rates, most browsed pages, etc. Are these tools I would be building in EE alone or are they available? Should I just stick to using something such as Google Analytics?

Thanks again. 😊