miniShop2 & mSearch questions

Hi,

I was looking at the miniShop2 demo site and liked the mSearch facility on there, is this part of miniShop2 or a separate addon that needs to be integrated into miniShop2?

What is the general consensus on useablity of minishop2 for non-Russion speaking designers/developers?

Also, can anyone post links to sites using miniShop2 (preferably in English)? It would be nice to see some practical applications of it as ecommerce seems to be the weak point of MODX. I'm not knocking MODX, it's the best CMS I've used and I love it, but a fully featured, well documented ecommerce addon would give MODX such a big boost. I know there is Foxycart, but none of my clients have wanted to go down the subscription service route with this so I have had to use another stand-alone ecommerce solution. Using MODX for ecommerce sites would be awesome!

Cheers - Zaphodx

I think there are plans for translations.
I don't have sound on this PC but I think I heared on youtube there where plans..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vn72k9lSrc

Would really be nice, I think many peoples think the same.

http://forums.modx.com/thread/88366/minishop-2-translation#dis-post-490320

There is some documentation about version 1 but might be pritty useless
http://rtfm.modx.com/extras/revo/minishop


[ed. note: fourroses666 last edited this post 10 years, 2 months ago.]

Hi fourroses666,

Thanks for the info. I have seen the video and looked at the documentation at Garret Overstreet's website which goes into some basic detail about installation and settings, but not full documentation by any measure.

I have been watching and waiting for a good ecommerce addon for over two years and have seen the likes of VisionCart (and another one that was going to be the "big thing" about 6-9 months ago that vanished without trace) come and go and have seen a hand full of other addons that are good but all have limitations about them. I know the MODX Cloud thing has been a priority for the MODX team to monetise MODX but I think a good ecommerce offering should be THE priority now as it would take MODX to the next level.

Maybe we'll be surprised with V3.0...

Same here, still hoping

I did try http://www.modxsimplecart.com
It was missing some "features" so I picked Magento which works just fine.

Good documentation is very important indeed.

My hopes are on minishop2 atm

Yes, I looked at modxsimplecart too and came to the same conclusion. How did you find the learning curve on Magento? (I see that Magento is owned by Ebay now!) Others I have looked at are Prestashop and Concrete5 + their ecommerce module (costs $125 though).

I saw that Susan Ottwell has offered to pay for a translation of the minishop2 documentation, but I don't think anything has happened with that yet. Hopefully something will happen soon.

From what I read on the MODX blog the MODX team are really paving the way for great things. They are making sure that all the underpinnings of MODX are as robust, secure, fast and open ended as they can be to form a very solid foundation for even more CMS goodness. There has been no mention of ecommerce though, but that must surely be on their agenda if they want to be a major player...

Magento is the best pick, takes some time to get to know it very well.

You can even do it without any costs, except hosting offcourse, even hosting can be cheap but the site will prolly be some slower.

Just takes allot of time to make a custom design and tune things up.
About all features are into it or can be installed with (free or payed) extentions.

If simplecart was open source it prolly would have been pritty big atm.

Yeah, I just had a look through the Magento Community Edition guides. It looks very capable but needs a lot of initial setting up and removal of all the "Demo Site" stuff to get a clean canvas, then it is quite involved to create your design (compared to MODX). This would all be worth while for a larger or high-paying site, but for smaller jobs probably not worth the amount of work involved, unless it is your pet project of course

I agree with what you say about simplecart. I'm surprised that Mark Hamstra at ModMore hasn't made an ecommerce Extra yet, I would have thought it would be the obvious thing for him to do and would sell very well if priced right, say <€25 per site. Whoever solves this properly could make a lot of money!

Oh well, I will carry on looking at alternatives for now.

True, for smaller sites/shops its a bit overkill and time consuming

Did do a (free) wordpress shop once but after upgrade I couldn't fix it anymore and got "bored" about WP.
Joomla I won't touch, I hate it.
Did a shop in (evo) Shopkeeper which worked but is now a Magento shop. Dunno about Shopkeeper in Rev.

I think making an Modx ecommerce extra will cost soo much time when doing it especially by only one person. Hopefully Mark and Bert Oost will work together on simplecart, but the idea behind simplecart was that it needs to be simple so it misses features.

Have just set up a test shop with miniShop2, the basic shop pages seem pretty straightforward actually, as long as you're OK with html, css and MODX principles. I haven't got as far as getting the checkout to be in the site rather than going to the PayPal page as I don't have a PayPal pro account to test with, have you built a site that way? May look into Stripe as well. Also, I haven't tried any form customisation for end client use, will be looking at that tomorrow.

Maybe there should be a "simplecart lite" with basic product, cart and payment features that is free and a "simplcart pro" that has a more comprehensive feature set that is paid for, that way there will be some return for the time and effort put into developing it.

Not a fan of WP or Joomla/Drupal, after working with MODX they seem so clunky.

yea, Simplecart lite will be great, only just to let peoples get to know how it works and then buy the full license, it has great potentional I think.

When it comes to Gateways I let others do the job, I have never learned how to work with php or coding and find it pritty hard to understand.