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• Tradewind Project Goals

  I have been developing e-commerce sites with a PHP shopping cart called osCommerce for some time now. and I have found it extremely frustrating to work with. It is old fashioned, its codebase is poorly organized, it is difficult to customize and configure, and I have serious questions regarding the security of the system. This is why I have decided to try and develop something better. My initial goals for Tradewind are as follows: * Modern design: Tradewind will be developed with modern environments in mind, the development platform is Apache 2.0 and PHP 5, both of which have been available for a while now and provide real advantages over their ancestors. * Object Oriented: Tradewind is to be designed a collection of highly self-contained modules, as a well-organized codebase is an easily-maintained and extended codebase. The advanced object model of PHP 5 makes this a lot more feasible that it would have been under PHP 3 and 4. * Separation of logic and presentation: Anybody who has tried to customize an osCommerce installation will appreciate how important this is! Code that has to do with the inner workings of the shop is interleaved with code that produces the user interface to the customer and the administrator. This makes customization extremely difficult and osCommerce shops have a tendency to all look the same as a result of this. Tradewind will make use of the Smarty template engine to keep the site design and the store logic completely separate. * Security: osCommerce doesn't take advantage of new functions added to PHP to increase security. Even worse, it depends on the infamous register_globals flag being on when this is known to be a tremendous security risk. Tradewind will make use of features like session ID regeneration and user agent fingerprinting to mitigate the chances of session hijacking attacks, and a number of strategies will be used to protect the system from cross-site scripting and SQL injection attacks, such as using multiple database users with access to dangerous database functions such as DROP TABLE restricted to those groups of users who need it. * A better model for the store catalogue: Most store fronts tend to use a catalogue organized like a computer's file system with categories and products organized like files and directories. This is adequate in most circumstances, but is not as flexible as it could potentially be. For example, suppose you run a store that sells furniture and also sells garden equipment. Most store fronts allow a product to belong to only one category, so into which category would you put a garden chair? With Tradewind the goal is to allow you to list a product under any category you consider to be appropriate. * Division of administration tasks: Most store fronts, like osCommerce, have a single admin control panel from which all administration tasks are performed. This is fine for small businesses, but suppose your business is not a single employee affair. Do the warehouse staff need access to global store configuration items, or customer's order histories, or the configuration items for the store's payment module? Tradewind will divide the admin tasks into specific groups. for ecample, warehouse staff will have access to stock data, open customer orders, etc, sales staff will be able to initiate a customer order over the phone, catalogue managers will be able to add new items or edit existing items in the catalogue, site designers will be able to modify store templates, and so on and so forth. This will allow the store owner to delegate tasks to other people without having to worry about giving those people access to sensitive information they don't need to see.

  posted by phennphawcks 1127 days ago

• Code committed

  Anonymous committed patchset 1 of module CVSROOT to the TradeWind CVS repository, changing 11 files

  posted by nobody 1169 days ago

• Forum thread added

  Anonymous created the Welcome to Developers forum thread

  posted by nobody 1169 days ago

• Forum thread added

  Anonymous created the Welcome to Open Discussion forum thread

  posted by nobody 1169 days ago

• Forum thread added

  Anonymous created the Welcome to Help forum thread

  posted by nobody 1169 days ago

• Project Information Updated

  phennphawcks registered the TradeWind project

  posted by phennphawcks 1169 days ago