Trouble setting up SimpleCart

Hello there.

I am quite new to Modx, but have been asked to develop a webshop for it.

I bought the simplecart add-on for Modx revolution, but I'm having some trouble setting it up.

Fx the TV's that is mentioned in the documentation, price and product code. I can't figure out if it is something I'm supposed to make myself or if it's already in modx? And if they are not, what am I supposed to put in them? What kind of input do they need and what will they output?

Same goes for the "stock TV" that the add-on says that I have to make myself. No idea what goes in or what comes out.

The documentation is rather poor english, full of spelling errors and skips over important details and no matter how many times I read it I dont get any smarter on this. I've tried writing the developer for some help, but I don't think they quite understand what the problem is.

Is there anyone out there that has experience with simplecart that could enlighten me on how I'm supposed to proceed with it?

Hey Cruiser,

SimpleCart 1.0 in all reality isn't really a full on "shopping cart" in the sense that you may be used to, but rather a helper snippet. Everything from creating products to listing products to virtually everything other than the final "Cart" aspect of the shopping process is left entirely in your hands to manage. This is great for flexibility, but less than ideal for a new modx user.

On the TV's used for SimpleCart, these are simply a way for SimpleCart to establish the price (or stock quantity) and link it to a unique ID for your product. Since products are just resources and not associated with SimpleCart, these TV's act as a link to associate which resources are products and how much they cost.

As far as I can tell, SimpleCart defaults to the resource ID for the productCode if none is supplied. I find that this suites my needs best as it is automated, and there is no potential for conflicts or extra fields to fill out.

So that being said, you technically don't "need" to create a TV for productCode, however you will need to create a TV for productPrice. Again, since products are simply resources, you'll just fill in the productPrice TV for each product (resource) so that SimpleCart knows what to charge for each item.

As far as the documentation is concerned, there is a certain level of Modx familiarity assumed. To try and attempt to explain the complete fundamentals of Modx as well is a bit beyond the scope of the SimpleCart documentation. Granted I can see how it would be very helpful to walk through an entire example of setting up a shop from beginning to end.

I've been slowly (as time allows) helping the developer with clarifying the English documentation but haven't made it all the way through. Could you kindly point out the spelling errors and issues with poor English so that I'm able to correct these in the near future?

Lastly, I've found the develop to be an excellent help with any problems I've had. He's went well above and beyond the call to help me with various questions I had with SimpleCart, so I'm pretty confident he won't leave you hanging.

Best of luck,
-Jared

Dear Christian,

Please stay contacting me as you did. I try to answer you questions, but I think you don't understand me. Just answered your last email so I hope that clears it out for you! Let me know!

Regards, Bert

It seems that people do actually read this part of the forum after all

Thank you JaredLoman for your explanation. I have also been in contact with Bert to iron out some of the confusion in regards to the terminologies used with SimpleCart. I think one of the main problems is that I'm used to shopping systems that is based on product data being kept in a database and so the idea of using an actual resource for each product didn't readily strike me as obvious.

But the idea of what is supposed to happen and how the module is supposed to work is much clearer to me now, and I think I will be able to work something out from this.

Thank you for your help.

Hi Cruiser,

I hope you make solid progress with this. It sounds like some of the smoke is clearing for you here.

How about this: would you be willing to document your progress with creating the TVs and cart items so that others might also learn from your discoveries?

Thanks!

Hi Photoweb

Well, the solution I'm working on is for a client, but I'm fairly certain they wouldn't mind that I showed a bit of how things are going to work.

It will probably take a while though. I am still working the early fases right now, but I will return with some material on how the implementation worked out once the system gets a bit more fleshed out

I would love to see some more info on this simplecart, i have bought a licence too to check it out and already picked some modx "features" which i hope to be able to implement.

Wishlist : UserValueList-rc1
Payment gateway module : Mollie
Search + filter : CatalogSearch 1.0-beta1

Hope this will be do-able because i'm more or less a front-end developer and wonder if people can share their "features" used in their shop as i will too.

// After the update from 1.2.6 to 1.2.8 the cart stopped working, changed my price tv to productPrice and it worked again.