Meld MiniStore: What Does It Need To Do?
Meld MiniCommerce is both an Ecommerce engine for Mura, as well as a lightweight shopping-cart system for Mura pages. As both a demonstration of what MiniCommerce can do for developers and as a way of giving Mura a basic-but-complete storefront solution, we want to create a base 'Mini' version of product creation/management to compliment the MiniCommerce plugin. Just like MiniCommerce, MiniStore is going to be open source under the GPL license.
This new plugin, tentatively called Meld MiniStore, is only going to have a short production cycle (~1 month) so the features will have to be carefully selected, and it isn't likely that it will go through more than one revision because the in-development Meld Ecommerce application is going to supersede both it and MiniCommerce (doing all of what the 'Mini' plugins do, plus a whole lot more).
MiniStore should be considered a ball on the field-type application. In other words, MiniStore should give you a storefront application but with specific needs addressed through custom, additional development. If you need the ball sitting on the 1-yard line, you'll need to wait for Meld Ecommerce.
MiniStore will incorporate many of the base 'extensibility' features found in MiniCommerce, including Mura Events and Renderers, to assist developers of all levels in adding customized functionality to the plugin, but we want to have something that your average web storefront owner would be able to use without requiring the services of a developer.
The big question is, what makes for a "basic but complete" storefront application? There are many features that could be included, and each of these can quickly become a labyrinth of functionality. The short list of areas we can look at (along with potential features) are:
- Product Creation: creating products, adding attributes, inventory management, versioning, display templates, downloadable products
- Discounts: product discounts, discounts by category/group/user, discounts per product, coupons, sales (adding products to discount sections), inheritance management (calculating discount based upon price/percentage/aggregation/'best discount')
- Shipping: choice of shipping methods, shipping based upon weights/distance/location, 'external shipping' modules (FedEx, etc.), discounts
- Taxes: tax based upon location (relative to current location), multiple taxes, custom tax calculations, tax exempt by product/user/group
- Customers: customer brower, order handling (received/shipped/etc.), front end (profiles, order browser, recommendations, notifications)
- Display: product pages, featured products, categories, navigation, product search, product feeds
The project is scheduled to commence at the beginning of the new year, so I thought it might be good to invite participation before the actual development begins. If you'd like to contribute, please comment us with a short list of what you'd like to see. Items like "multi-state tax calculations based upon user group" obviously won't make it into the final list, so please be selective about what you'd need for it to be useful and usable.
