[Collective-commerce] PloneMall customization: problems and questions

[Giovanni T. <to...@un...>]

Hi all,

I've just started to experiment with PloneMall in a site that intends to 
sell training courses.
In order to define a new item type, subclassing SimpleItem, I've copied the 
PloneMallDemo product, renamed it and extended it using ArchGenXml and 
Poseidon Community.

In the following I list things I did, problems I found and things I don't 
understand well, in the hope that
- I will get some useful suggestion
- the feedback I'm providing could be useful to the developers and other 
users.

1. In a plain Plone site I've installed all PloneMall products, with 
portal_quickinstaller, in the same order than PloneMallCustomizationPolicy 
would have done

2. I've installed my new product, say Medialab, including only one new 
content type, say CourseItem

3. I found that the categories tab did not show in the view of the Category 
and CourseItem types; so I inserted by hand stuff in CourseItem.py - 
code-section module-header and code-section module-footer - in order to 
register my type as a Categorizeable one (taken from Demo.py of 
PloneMallDemo)

4. I also removed from the ArchGenXml-generated CourseItem.py an assignment 
"actions = ()"

5. I created a file Medialab-it.po in Products/Medialab/i18n, with the 
Italian customization of the Medialab product

6. I created a file PloneMallItem-it.po in Products/PloneMallItem/i18n, with 
the Italian customization of the PloneMallItem product (plonemallitem 
domain)

7. I found that the PloneMallItem language customization was effective in 
mall_browse.pt, but not in mall_browse_macro.pt; so I created a copy of 
mall_browse_macro.pt in Products/Medialab/skins/Medialab (higher priority); 
in this copy I added the opening and closing tags of a normal HTML page, in 
order to include the attribute i18n:domain="plonemallitem"

8. While now the PloneMallItem language customization is effective for 
static text defined in the page templates, it is not for labels and help 
messages of AT fields defined in the schemas of the ancestor classes of 
CourseItem; I cannot understand that, since the AT schema of CourseItem adds 
some fields to the schema of SimpleItem, which in turn adds some fields to 
the schema of BaseItem, and all fields of these include 
i18n_domain='PloneMallItem' in the widget clause; perhaps i18n domain names 
are case-sensitive? in this case .py files use the wrong spelling

9. For normal users, I wanted to hide the content action "categories" from 
the view of the Category and CourseItem content types; so, with 
portal_types, in the action form of each of these types, I changed the 
Permissions property to "Modify portal content"

10. I found that in the item view the user could not see the extended data 
I've put in the CourseItem content type; so with portal_types, in the action 
form of CourseItem I've changed the Action property of the action "View" 
from "string:$object_url/mall_itemsimple" to "string:$object_url/base_view"; 
but doing so, I've lost the "Add to cart" link near the item price: how 
could I recover it?

11. If I understand correctly what categories are and how they relate to 
items, I would expect that, in the category browse view (mall_browse.pt), 
after the "Categories" (plural) heading 
(i18n:translate="browse_title_categories"), there was a list of possible 
sub-categories, in order to navigate down; instead only the Full description 
of the category is shown

12. If I associate an item with a category, as noted already by others, when 
I click on the "more ..." link of an item in the category browse view, the 
navigation portlet highlights the folder physically containing the item, 
while the user should not be aware of this; I've seen that somebody proposed 
smart solutions for this problem, and more generally for managing 
categorization; but for now I don't need to add more categories to the same 
item; so I've put each item inside the unique category it belongs to, after 
having added CourseItem to the "Allowed content types" for Category 
(portal_types/Category, Property form): could that have some drawbacks?

13. When the cart is empty, I think I should get a message saying that, not 
a table header without any table body

14. How is that in the PloneMall UML model (PloneMall.zuml) no connection is 
shown between Category and (Base)Item classes?

15. Are there examples of PloneMall installations, even in test/development 
stage, that I could access in order to see how a PloneMall site should/could 
appear to the user?

16. By the way, where could I find an introduction to the use of interfaces 
in Plone/Archetypes?

Thanks in advance, Giovanni Toffoli

--
Giovanni Toffoli
Link srl
Via Udine 30 - 00161 Roma
tel. +39 06 44231115, 340 0727780
fax +39 06 44231328