News

After a long time, here are some updates about LFS:

News:

• LFS moved to bitbucket: http://bitbucket.org/diefenbach/django-lfs/
• Cleaned up documentation and added new stuff: http://packages.python.org/django-lfs/

New Code:

• Added vouchers
• Added redirects (based on Django's redirects app)
• Added pluggable templates (Jens Zeidler - iqplusplus)
• Added manufacturers (Michaela Hering - Demmelhuber)
• Added featured products (Michael Thornhill - Maithu IT Solutions)
• Added spain translations (sorry, I forgot who provided this :(
• Added more tests

New live shops:

• http://shop.fischer-jugend.de/
• http://ethnochicbazar.com/
• http://www.molloyspharmacy.com/
• http://www.gadgeteria.ru/
• There are some more in the pipe (we'll give an update soon)

What's coming next:

• Michael is working hard on integration of country specific addresses based on django-countries and django-postal (we hope we are getting it out of the door soon)
• I made some tests with a GXT-based management interface: Screencast. Will see whether this will go in LFS some time.
• Better documentation for users and developers
• Having more lfs-fun :)

After some time here are some news about LFS:

Misc

• The code has been moved to bitbucket: http://bitbucket.org/diefenbach/django-lfs/
• There is a first public release on PyPi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-lfs. (Please note that LFS is still in alpha, though)
• There is also a new buildout to make installation even easier: http://bitbucket.org/diefenbach/lfs-buildout-quickstart/. To install a whole shop one has just to do the following four steps: 
  1. $ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/diefenbach/lfs-buildout-quickstart/
  2. $ cd lfs-buildout-quickstart
  3. $ python bootstrap.py
  4. $ bin/buildout -v
• There is another buildout for development: http://bitbucket.org/diefenbach/lfs-buildout-development/

Documentation

• Goeff Kelsall provided some documentation on how to install LFS on Windows and some stuff on how to get started: 
  • http://code.google.com/p/django-lfs/wiki/InstallationWindowsTest
  • http://code.google.com/p/django-lfs/wiki/GettingStartedDesign
  • http://code.google.com/p/django-lfs/wiki/GettingStartedShop

New Stuff

• Send rating mails: the shop owner is now able to ask customers to rate their bought products after the order has been closed for some time.

Sorry for being quite for such a long time. We'll try to be more regular in future.

There has been a lot of progress in the last couple of weeks. Here are the important things:

Improvements

• A more generic and flexible category tree (added start level and expand level)
• Better manage views for products, customer, orders, carts, reviews
• Improved topseller portlet
• Removed all URLs from Javascript

Bugfixes

• Calculation of average rating
• Calculation of delivery time for variants
• Take care of non active products at several places (e.g. product navigation).

New stuff

• Pluggable credit cart handling (needs some improvements though)
• Pluggable generic export of products

And that's all for this week. Next week there will be more about LFS.

This are the LFS news for week 29.

New Shop:

In the last couple of weeks we migrated http://www.demmelhuber.net/shop from EasyShop (Plone - http://www.geteasyshop.com) to LFS. Demmelhuber is a (inofficially) top-500 shop in germany and has >1000 unique visits per day. This give LFS a lot of requirements and use cases from a power user (e.g. interfaces to ERP, ebay, amazon, price comparing portals a powerful management interface, etc.).

Products: 

• Display and find only active products.

Variants:

• Variants can now be sorted within the product. 
• Some improvements concerning data inheritance from the base product.

Criteria:

We added some more criteria: combined length and girth, valid shipping/payment methods (which opens some powerful possibilities to make shipping/payment methods dependent from each other) and some others.

Addresses/Localization:

Michael created a branch for the dynamic display of certain address fields, like state and country. This is (could be) a start for some kind of localization (addresses, currencies, etc.). We need some more insights and discussions. So if you are interested don't hesitate to get in touch.

Carts:

Added first simple views to manage carts (this needs more improvements).

Bugfixes / Cleanups:

• A lot of template cleanups. 
• Several bugfixes concerning to variants.
• Several bugfixes concerning to the checkout page.

SWFUpload:

I still don't get SWFUpload with lighttpd or Apache/WSGI to work (frankly, I don't really tried it very hard). Anyway, with Apache/FastCGI it's working here.

And that's all for this week. Next week there will be more about LFS.

This are the LFS news for week 26.

Portlets  

The portlets story goes on. At the moment there are almost all portlets ported to the portlet engine: cart, categories, pages, recent product, related products, text and topseller. Some of them need some love, though.  

Additionally for all portlets there are also inclusion tags to render the portlet within templates. So you don't have to use the engine if you don't need this kind of flexibility. 

You can also easily register your own portlets and slots (by default there is a left and a right slot).  

Design

The design has been refactored. 

We are using a tableless base template with the help of blueprint now.

Also some simplification has been taken place (this is an ongoing process at the moment)

Shops

We are working on the migration of demmelhuber.net to LFS. demmlhuber.net is a german top 500 shop with more than 30.000 unique visitors per month. This surely will give us some new use cases and experiences for the future.

Next week I will work with some designers on a new shop. I expect some insights from their perspective which will flow positively into the template structure.

Issues

I found out that SWFUpload (which we are using for mass upload of product images) doesn't work with lighttpd at the moment. I haven't found a solution for that yet.

Uservoice

We have created an uservoice account for LFS: http://lfs.uservoice.com/. So if you have some ideas don't hesitate to share them with us.

And that's all for this week. Next week there will be more about LFS.