Meld MiniCommerce: Ecommerce has arrived for Mura
Meld Solutions is proud to introduce Meld MiniCommerce, an open source Ecommerce plugin for the Mura CMS.
MiniCommerce is an Ecommerce 'engine' that adds a wide range of Ecommerce functionality to a Mura website. At its most basic level MiniCommerce allows you to turn any Mura page into a product. The "add to cart" form that automatically appears on the Product page can be as simple as setting the quantity or it can include any sort of custom attributes you might wish to include.
This, however, is only the smallest part of what MiniCommerce is capable of. MiniCommerce is built from the ground up to be highly extensible and customizable. Developers can integrate their own product formats, discount models and shipping calculators into the process, keeping all of their custom business logic inside their own application where it belongs. Multiple external programs can easily interact with MiniCommerce at the same time, allowing you to add event registrations, coffee mugs or any other type of product you might wish. These functional enhancements can come as simply as adding a simple function in the existing Mura eventHandler files, or as comprehensive as developing entire Mura plugins that interact with the MiniCommerce Events, Renderers and API.
For instance, by using a standard Mura eventHandler you could add calculated discounts depending upon the user group, or even add a user to a new group when a certain product was purchased. Taken a little further, a plugin could fire the onMeldMiniCommerceAddProduct event to add its own products to the cart. Another plugin might introduce 'coupons' to the mix, modifying the checkout form to allow customers to enter codes for discounts. Yet another plugin might add discounts based upon the Mura group they are a member of, or even add them to a permission group based upon a product that was purchased.
MiniCommerce handles all of the transaction processing, including Snail-Mail transactions such as cheques or invoicing, live credit card transactions via processing merchants like PayPal, and allows developers to even add 'custom' payment methods like credits or tokens that they can process themselves.
Transactions are available for viewing through the comprehensive transaction viewer, which allows for easy sorting and searching through a variety of filters.
For more information, visit the MiniCommerce product page. The beta version of Meld MiniCommerce is available for download from this area as well. We have put up a dedicated support forum for the Beta version of Meld MiniCommerce as well.
