LemonStand Blog

Open Beta Successfully Launched

2 Comment(s) | published by Halarewich D. on Monday, January 11, 2010

On January 11, around 3am PST the beta version of LemonStand was released to the global public. Simply by registering on the website, people everywhere can now get a beta license key and install LemonStand and start learning how to use the platform.

Virtual camp out

Within minutes of putting the form online, before we had a chance to announce it on Twitter, Facebook or to our email list we started getting registrations. It was as though people were sitting at our homepage, waiting for the "Download Beta" button to turn yellow.

The immediate results were very exciting and encouraging for the team. Once we announced the release through various channels, registrations accelerated quickly and are still coming in every few minutes.

Feedback, feedback, feedback.

Our main goal for running the open beta was to get feedback and bug reports. Especially concerning various hosting environments. There are many server configurations out there and we need help from all of you to get LemonStand compatible with as many of these as possible.

We have already squashed a few bugs in regards to the installation process, and this led to us updating the installer. More on that later.

Join us in the forum

If you are having issues installing LemonStand or otherwise, register on our forum and post the details. We'll help you sort it out as quickly as possible. We have alredy helped several people get issues resolved and look forward to helping more of you.

This is a very exciting milestone for us, and we look forward to seeing our sprouting community continue to grow and mature over the coming months.

 

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The demo store has been updated

0 Comment(s) | published by Bobkov A. on Sunday, January 03, 2010

We are glad to announce that we just updated our demo store. While doing the private alpha test we integrated many new features that were on our to-do list. And most recently we updated the demo store, including these features.

The new features are:

• Discounts. We added a permanent catalog-level discount and a demo coupon.
• Product sorting in categories. You can now sort products by name or by price.
• One-click checkout implementation (as an alternative to the conventional checkout process).
• A whole lot of updates in the Administration Area including loadable sets of product options, grouped products sorting, product duplication and product batch operations, top category products, improved pages management and many more.

Feel free to explore the updated demo store and see the new feature for youself inside the Administration Area!

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Announcement: Open Beta Coming January 11, 2010

11 Comment(s) | published by Halarewich D. on Monday, December 28, 2009

After many months of developing LemonStand into a maturing and flexible eCommerce platform, we are finally able to announce a date for the open beta: January 11, 2010.

We know a lot of you have been patiently waiting for a chance to use LemonStand, so we are very excited to be giving you a firm release date. In two weeks you will be able to download LemonStand, install it, and begin getting familar with using it to build your eCommerce websites.

What you can expect in 2 weeks

Come January 11, you will be able to register for the open beta on our website. It will be a form that you fill out and submit to us. You will then automatically recieve an email back with a license key, and a link to download the installer. This will be everything you need to install LemonStand. Our current wiki will become public as well, giving you access to development documentation so you can dig into things.

After the beta

We do not have any specific timeline for how long the beta will last. We have a roadmap for things we need to complete before releasing version 1.0 of LemonStand, but the actual timeline depends on some variable factors. We are planning to focus on completing all of these tasks as quickly as possible while the open beta is running.

Once version 1.0 is released you will be able to upgrade your installations of LemonStand. You will just need to purchase a license and follow some simple actions to accomplish this. Along with releasing 1.0 will be launching other exciting things. Things like partner programs and the marketplace. We'll provide more details about those in the future.

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LemonStand is good for code wranglers too

2 Comment(s) | published by Bobkov A. on Wednesday, December 23, 2009

While we like to talk about LemonStand's limitless design capabilities, it also provides great support and flexibility for developers. As websites in LemonStand can be developed from the scratch, we are trying to provide the best possible development experience.

The code is already written!

By allowing you to develop websites from the scratch we do not leave you with just a raw API. We have already written code which works behind most of the common pages found on an eCommerce site, e.g. the category page, or the shopping cart page. We incapsulated this common code into so called actions. When you create a new page, you can select which action it should be based on. For example, if you develop a category page, you select the shop:category action for the page. And voila - you have an almost working Category page. The action will load a requested category object into the $category variable, and all that you need now is to display the category name and products.

Great API documentation!

Each action, class and function is documented in a special section of our Wiki (soon we will share the Wiki publicly). Further to that, the actions have inline documentation, which displays general information about the actions and variables which it generates. Every time you select an action in the Action drop-down list on the Create/Edit Page form, the action documentation is automatically updated. The inline documentation has links to the Wiki pages, so you can always get more information about the action or API classes it's refering to.

Syntax highlighting

There is nothing to add to the header. Syntax highlighting is available absolutely everywhere you need to edit code: in the page editors, template and partial editors. Line numbers are also shown in all editors. Every code editor can be open in full-screen mode, simplifying code editing.

Simple AJAX

With LemonStand every form can be posted to the server and processed either in a normal POST or AJAX mode. The standard actions, included in the eCommerse solution have numerous AJAX handlers which you can use for performing standard operations like adding a product to the shopping cart. Of course, you can develop your own AJAX interactions, if you need. The LemonStand AJAX implementation is very simple. You only need to specify which handler on the server to call (it can be a LemonStand-provided handler, or your custom handler), and which elements on the page you want to be updated.

Easy troubleshooting

Errors in pages and templates during the learning and development process are bound to happen to even the best developer. LemonStand makes it very simple to troubleshoot due to the built-in detailed error information page. This page appears each time something goes wrong with your code or with the LemonStand configuration. The error page not only displays for you the error message, but also highlights the line of code where the error originated and displays the call stack. In some cases it even provides hints about how you can fix the error. Of course, you can disable the detailed error page when you are ready to launch the website and monitor the system health using the error log.

There you have it folks. LemonStand is built for developers too.

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