LemonStand is good for code wranglers too

2 | published by Aleksey B. 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.