We are currently using a third party Drupal distribution that is locked down due to contractual agreement.
What is the best way for us to add forms to our site that will post to a web service?
Options we considered are:
Deploy another open distribution (core) that we can add forms to and link from the third party site.
Paying the vendor to create the form for us on that distribution (expensive, long lead time).
Any other options?
It's hard to say without actually knowing the details of your contractual agreement.
With drupal a distribution is a set of modules and configuration that lies in the profiles subdirectory of your drupal file system.
So you can add additional modules outside of that by adding them to the sites/all/modules directory.
That way they are not actually part of the distribution but you can still use them.
So for example you can add a custom module that has the forms & web service posting to sites/all/modules and it won't impact the distribution at all.
However if your contract says something like you cannot modify your drupal site/configuration at all then I think you're pretty stuck in a crappy contract.
If you are in a contract where it is expensive & takes a long time to do something that sounds relatively straight forward (again I don't know the details but a form that submits to a web service is generally pretty straight forward) but you aren't allowed to go outside of them to do the work you're in trouble.
Deploying another site just for a form or a couple of forms doesn't really sound like a good idea.
If they belong on the existing site they should be part of the existing site.
If the contract really does exclude you from adding your own code to the site at all it comes down to discussing it with your website provider.
Surely if you aren't allowed to modify the site then there should be a clause that covers you in the case that they don't complete work in a timely fashion.
Related
I'm admittedly unsure whether this post falls within the scope of acceptable SO questions. If not, please advise whether I might be able to adjust it to fit or if perhaps there might be a more appropriate site for it.
I'm a WinForms guy, but I've got a new project where I'm going to be making web service calls for a Point of Sale system. I've read about how CRUD operations are handled in RESTful environments where GET/PUT/POST/etc represent their respective CRUD counterpart. However I've just started working on a project where I need to submit my requirements to a developer who'll be developing a web api for me to use but he tells me that this isn't how the big boys do it.
Instead of making web requests to create a transaction followed by requests to add items to the transaction in the object based approach I'm accustomed to, I will instead use a service based approach to just make a 'prepare' checkout call in order to see the subtotal, tax, total, etc. for the transaction with the items I currently have on it. Then when I'm ready to actually process the transaction I'll make a call to 'complete' checkout.
I quoted a couple words above because I'm curious whether these are common terms that everyone uses or just ones that he happened to choose to explain the process to me. And my question is, where might I go to get up to speed on the way the 'big boys' like Google and Amazon design their APIs? I'm not the one implementing the API, but there seems to be a little bit of an impedance mismatch in regard to how I'm trying to communicate what I need and the way the developer is expecting to hear my requirements.
Not sure wrt the specifics of your application though your general understanding seems ik. There are always corner cases that test the born though.
I would heed that you listen to your dev team on how things should be imolemented and just provide the "what's" (requirements). They should be trusted to know best practice and your company's own interpretation and standards (right or wrong). If they don't give you your requirement (ease-of-use or can't be easily reusable with expanded requirements) then you can review why with an architect or dev mgr.
However, if you are interested and want to debate and perhaps understand, check out Atlassian's best practice here: https://developer.atlassian.com/plugins/servlet/mobile#content/view/4915226.
FYI: Atlassian make really leading dev tools in use in v.large companies. Note also that this best-practices is as a part of refactoring meaning they've been through the mill and know what worked and what hasn't).
FYI2 (edit): Reading between the lines of your question, I think your dev is basically instructing you specifically on how transactions are managed within ReST. That is, you don't typically begin, add, end. Instead, everything that is transactional is rolled within a transaction wrapper and POSTed to the server as a single transaction.
I have been asked to oversee the development of a handful of sites. The people running the show want it so that if you sign onto one of the sites, then you are automatically signed onto the rest of them.
One of my buddies who is a great programmer says there is no safe way to do this, is he right?
I had an idea that the main site (parent site) could host the daughter sites as sub domains, with each site having its own unique domain name.
What do you think?
Yes, it can be done. However, it won't be a trivial solution but will be a very expensive project that requires an extensive set of skills. Companies typically try to achieve this by establishing internal solutions themselves but tend to fail as complexity increases.
What you are trying to accomplished can also be done as a service. You may want to take a look at the following webpage:
http://www.covisint.com/web/guest/about-identity-services
Hope that helps!
I'm searching for a shopping cart or web store framework that supports multiple vendors.
There are many, many shopping cart frameworks out there: that page lists couple of hundred. In spite of the comparisons on that page, supporting multiple vendors isn't a comparison item, probably because it's a rare requirement. Separate to that page I have evaluated a few of what appear to be the top frameworks, and none that I evaluated supported this feature. Which carts would you recommend?
Commercial is okay, although I would prefer open source.
Platform (Windows, Linux, ASP.Net, PHP, Ruby... Minix, Fortran... :)) doesn't matter.
A system
where I manually add vendors who request it (instead of them freely
being able to sign up) is also okay, if there's a store where that's
possible but freely joining up isn't built in yet.
Rationale: I'd like to create an app-store like website. "App store" is a close analogy: it won't sell apps, but it will sell digital goods and I'd like anyone to be able to sell their item on the store. It's this second requirement, multiple vendors selling through the store, that I'm finding hard to satisfy.
I've used multiple shopping cart frameworks (a lot of them broken), and my favorite (which just so happens to support multiple vendors) is PrestaShop. It's free, open source, and suppports all that you asked for. Is this the framework you were looking for?
-JXP
The Wikipedia page you cited lists multiple vendor support as a column in Other Features, along with features that are pertinent to your search.
This question otherwise requires domain knowledge and likely requires multiple answers. The best I can do is offer the bounded set of software that competes directly within this space, at least according to Wikipedia.
The easiest solution for achieving your stated goal of allowing multiple people to sell on your site while exercising fine-grained control of who can and cannot do so is perhaps using WPMU's MarketPress in tandem with BuddyPress or WordPress Multisite. I'm not a die-hard fan of WordPress, per se, but that might be an expedient way for you to get to a minimal viable product and to validate your idea before shelling out the time and/or cash to custom build it from the ground up, and/or labor ad nauseam with tweaking an existing framework. MarketPress is a good plug-in that'll give you many of the features of a full-fledged e-commerce framework... BuddyPress, of course, will allow you to set up individual vendor's with their own sites under your brand. The two work together. More on MarketPress at:
http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/e-commerce/installation/
Another alternative is Jimdo's PagePartners. I haven't used it, but it looks intriguing. I like their design sensibilities, and their stated business ethos. This might be a viable option, too. The caveat being: it's not white label. More info about Jimdo's PagePartners here:
http://www.jimdo.com/pagepartner/faq/
Finally, another interesting CMS to explore is SetSeed. I think it'll allow you to launch multiple sites for each vendor via a central hub you control, and will allow you to maintain your branding within each. How, the,n any sort of renumeration would flow back to you for setting up an individual vendor's store would be up to you to figure out... This is a fairly new CMS and it looks like it's evolving smartly and rapidly. If you require some customization of it, to approach more specifically what you ask for, now might be a good time to reach out to the developer...but you might be able to think of an effective way to adapt it for your use right out of the box.
http://setseed.com/multi-site-cms/setseed-hub/
Unfortunately, none of the above is open-source--but, again, the ease by which you could get to a functional site approximating your idea may off-set that drawback. Jimdo is an open-source contributor, however. So, maybe even an e-mail to them might be a fruitful dialogue to begin. If anything, check out each of the above, and it may influence how you search for other solutions, and will at least provide some models in your own thinking or with other developers. The shopping cart is an integrated feature, I believe, in all of the above cases. With regard to giving your vendors the capacity to deliver digital goods (e-books, mp3s, etc.), check out Fetchapp.com. Very cool app. Very easy to set-up...could probably be rolled into one of the above frameworks. The frameworks would handle the issue of individual vendor profiles and/or sub-domains.
I have a web site project, a mixture of complex dynamic pages and authored CMS-managed content. I have the tools for the complex dynamic part and would like a CMS that allows me to call it to retrieve content that's been approved, i.e. for web site inclusion.
To be clear, I need the complex dynamic part to be the master and the CMS-managed content to be served up as and when I want it.
I had thought they'd be loads of options around this - it being an obvious (to me) thing to want to do. I'd also thought that CMS's would naturally publish API's (web service based ideally) to enable this...but my research so far doesn't seem to show this. Hopefully I'm just missing a trick. Can anyone help?
I've looked, btw, at openText, Alfresco, Jahia, Enfold, Percussion, Interwoven, EPIServer, Ektron to name a few.
Ideally, I'd like an open source CMS solution if there is one, definitely can't afford the big $ that some of the vendors are looking for.
Am I right in assuming you are wanting to use an API or Service to retrieve content from the CMS that has been through some approval process?
This is definately possible with EPiServer, through either the code API or, if more appropriate, a webservice, although I think the price might be an issue here.
I need an advice about a php/MySql CMS which is:
1.Safe for shared hosting. I.e. a CMS which poses no problem when it is deployed on a regular shared hosting. E.g. a CMS which requires write permissions for everybody on some folders or files is not safe in this case. Maybe there are other considerations as well. The CMS must still enable the user to upload photos etc. to his content.
2.Is dead simple from the end-user point of view, and moderately difficult from the designer/developer point of view. This includes
a) in-place editing capabilities because this is what makes it simple for the end-user
b) possibility for designer/developer to hide all CMS complexity from the user (at the price of reducing advanced features) to make it easy to use even for a dumb end-user
How about Drupal 7? AFAIK, the standard installation does not require write for everybody permissions, so it's safe. But according to the ease of use, while it has in-place editing capabilities, Drupal has no real mechanism to hide complexity from the end user, at least not that I am aware of. When clicking on the edit in-place button, the user is presented with a quite complex form to edit node, even if he has limited permissions.
How about Apostrophe Now? While it has excellent in-place editing capabilities and the end-user simplicity is really there, it requires write permissions for everybody on some folders and is not advised for shared hosting in its documentation.
Any ideas?
There are much CMSs you could use which are based on php and mysql and that are:
Joomla
Drupal
Wordpress
and much more