Tell us what CMS features that you want
13 Comment(s) | published by Danny H. on Thursday, February 04, 2010
LemonStand is not only a shopping cart, but a CMS as well. We realized that it's very rare for an eCommerce site to not have content management needs beyond the product catalog. There are often static pages, homepages with a mix of dynamic and static content and sometimes a blog.
We already have a blog module in development, and we plan to release it shortly after version 1.0 is becomes available. So now you know that is coming.
That being said, we have foundsome people asking us if LemonStand could be integrated with third-party CMSs. We would like to find out from the community why some of you would like to use other CMSs - because of habit/comfort or because LemonStand is missing some key CMS features. Granted, there might be some cases where complicated content management features are required that are beyond the scope of all or most already existing CMSs and a custom solution is needed. But we want to get your opinion on what how you think we can improve the CMS feature set within LemonStand.
Tell us what you think. Comment on this blog post, or get involved on the forum discussion. This is your chance to direct the future of LemonStand!
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Comments
Aleks Bochniak
Thursday, February 04, 2010Different content types
Dynamic image gallery and thumb-nailing
Ability to add custom fields to content
Stefan Weise
Thursday, February 11, 2010A directory and file based templating system
A seperate navigation menu where you can build your menus visually
Mark
Friday, February 12, 2010A proper, user friendly database management dashboard..
Something that allows for the easy export/import and editing of customer/member details (including passwords), product details (with images), order details etc.
EG People with existing sites will obviously need to migrate such data to lemonstand.
Not being able to easily import it all is always a deal breaker..
lukasz
Friday, February 12, 2010Revisions. Make them go back at least 5-10 versions.
Jason
Wednesday, February 17, 2010Because so many developers work with a feature set they've developed over many years in a framework, I'd guess they're not willing to completely throw that out even if LemonStand is excellent at many standard CMS functions. For us, we're mostly concerned that our clients have a one stop shop for their site content management - hence the desire to manage both code development, code snippets, design templates etc from within a master framework, while external functionality (LemonStand/ecomm) lives within that framework happily.
Danny Halarewich
Wednesday, February 17, 2010@Jason - While we understand that moving over to a new platform is a significant risk and investment, we feel that we have provided the tools to do so successfully. And we plan on constantly providing more functionality in these areas as time goes on through updates and modules.
We have no plans to provide support to mesh third party CMSs with LemonStand as it opens up a huge can of worms regarding security, compatibility and many other things. But there is nothing stopping you from doing this on your own.
Additionally, many sites are not broken up into distinct store and content sections any more. The need to manage both products, "static" and dynamic content all on a single page is a very common requirement for many customers. The only seamless, ideal way to accomplish this is to use a single "one stop shop" platform that has the features to manage each type of content. And this is what we are (attempting) to provide through LemonStand.
Jason
Thursday, February 18, 2010@Danny Thanks Danny – absolutely, I completely understand the logic and if I were in your shoes I would be doing the same thing.
My "issue", if you can call it that, is that it's not just a question of migration, it's also a question of a developer framework with significant investment in API integration with business systems, established plugin development and developer/designer/staff training in general. Many of these items may not be reasonable to expect out of Lemonstand –– unless Lemonstand expects to create itself as a complete developer framework, which would be wonderfully ambitious, but a far different path than establishing itself as a top notch ecommerce platform.
We will most likely work to integrate Lemonstand as part of our preferred developer framework and start there; but of course always interested in what you have in mind for Lemonstand's future beyond version 1.
cheers
J
Danny Halarewich
Thursday, February 18, 2010@Jason - I am not 100% sure what you mean by "developer framework". But nonetheless, LemonStand has a very powerful and flexible API that will allow you to develop modules to accomplish almost any task, or integrate with other applications. Your ability and resources are the only real limit.
We will also be working very hard to provide comprehensive learning materials which include documentation, tutorials, guidelines, videos, etc.
If you are talking about the challenge of moving to a new platform because you have already invested time/money into learning other systems, well, that's an internal debate only you and your organization can decide. As mentioned, we are providing the tools to accomplish anything you need. I can't tell you whether the investment is worth it for you or not.
I recommend that you dig into LemonStand on a trial basis. Get into the API and learn the PHP framework we use and see how efficient it is. Then decide how you want to integrate LemonStand into your tool set. Thanks.
Jason
Thursday, February 18, 2010@Danny - thanks Danny, appreciate the chat. By framework, I mean a system that does a CMS, but goes beyond that by providing proper logic, design and template segregation to allow development teams to collaborate without hacking away at any core (bad).
To some degree I do believe Lemonstand is moving in this direction, so I really do want to get going on trying things out.
We already do have a copy and just haven't gotten to working on it yet. Working on getting those clients who want to pay for all this fun };-D
cheers, thanks again
VB
Saturday, February 20, 2010It would be cool if a customer using my eCommerce site, could create an account for the eCommerce portion of the site and that account could be integrated with vBulletin, so there is only one login for both the cart and forum. If that could be done, then customers could access the other programs that already integrate with vBulletin, like Photopost, review and classifieds.
Then they only need one account to access everything on the site. People are crying for this type of integration for membership sites. Can you do this?
SoccerGuy3
Saturday, February 20, 2010My client is looking for a new solution for his magazine business. Does Lemonstand have a subscription management module or plans for one? Or should I start looking into how to create one?
Danny Halarewich
Saturday, February 20, 2010@Soccerguy - There are no subscription selling features yet. It is planned, but there is no estimated date when it will be complete. If you need it soon, I would recommend you look into creating one.
Danny Halarewich
Monday, March 01, 2010We wanted to mention here that we have decided to add a feature that will allow you to manage pages, templates and partials as actual files. It will be optional. This will allow you to use SVN to manage all site resources and files if you want.
We have also already added a CSV import feature. So you can import products and customers from other systems.
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