I'm a graphic/interface designer with a very _basic_ (see: minimal) background in programming, except HTML and JS, and I love Interchange. I do have access to a great programmer, but have only needed to call on him a couple of times for a bit of Perl. Our client wanted lots of customization, which, as far as I know, wouldn't have been possible with Miva. I find the interface fairly easy to work with. I haven't had any trouble modifying and adding tables, as needed. I was able to easily modify the look-and-feel of foundation store; the end result is something entirely new and different.
Yes, there's a big learning curve, but it's been a smooth ride, for the most part. The documentation is lacking but getting better. I've been dependent on the list archives; it has gotten me out of I-don't-know-how-many jams.
Customization is our primary concern and in that respect, Interchange wins easily. We wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to future clients.
Lara At 10:41 AM 11/26/02 -0800, you wrote:
Hi all, I've been reviewing e-commerce packages for a store I want to open and I have pretty much narrowed down my choices to Interchange and Miva. I was hoping I could ask a few questions here to help me decide. Basically I'm interested in opinions from folks who have actually used both products. I realize cost is one major difference, but I'd like to ignore that for now and find the best product. For a quick outline of what I'm doing, the shop I'm getting ready to get going on is a sports shop with NFL, NHL etc... stuff. There will need to be multiple levels of categories (ie, apparel -> mens -> shirts) and different ways of sorting ie (product categories, leagues, teams, players, events, etc.) and multiple vendors. I want to start slow with a few products and slowly continue to add products/vendors. Some vendors I will buy direct from and handle shipping and others will drop ship. Later on I want to add things like an affiliate program and a "members" area where people can customize preferences, track past orders, set birthday reminders and such. It will initially run on FreeBSD/MySQL, although that may change to Linux next year, and running on our own servers. Also, from going through the mailing list archive, I'm figuring to start with 4.8.6 since 4.9.3 doesn't seem to be 100% production stable yet, although I really like some of the new features in there, including mod_perl. 1. How steep is the learning curve on this? I have heard it's pretty high. I have some perl/mysql background and a programmer I work with who has a lot more. I've worked with programs using Template Toolkit and have some familiarity with that, which seems somewhat similar to how templates are used here. 2. How easy is it to switch from one to the other, ie. if I decide on one and find it wasn't the right one for me, can the data be converted relatively easily from/to interchange/miva. 3. Is there some sort of repository for additional modules where I can find add-ons that aren't part of the core package (ie, like mvcool.com or mvcentral.com) 4. Is there an expected time frame when 4.9.3 will become stable? 5. Can products be in more than one category? And can there be additional levels of product groups/categories... In the demo I see product group which appears to be the first level of grouping, then category, which appears to be a subgrouping of product group. 6. I didn't see anything in the demo for importing products. Is there a facility to do this and can it handle both full imports (for updating everything on the site) and incremental imports (for just adding new products)? And is it as simple as creating a text file, uploading and running an import program? 7. I don't quite get the concept of having multiple catalogs vs subcatalogs. Ultimately where I want to go is to have multiple stores (is that catalogs?) and within at least the main store, let vendors have access to their product data and reporting (is this a subcatalog). 8. Is is possible to have different templates for different categories.. for example in all of hockey it might use one template and another for football... and then say on the teams areas, it might use different css files for team colors and such? 9. How hard is it to add fields to various tables to be used either in the user side or the admin side or both? For example, let's say I wanted to add a cost field that I can add to reports in the admin? Or options fields for products? Or say a vendor id or additional features for more product information? 10. And this is for later too, but can I create a separate "store" if you will, where anyone can register to add products (become a vendor) and have a marketplace like at amazon, based on the same category structure and stuff. I'm thinking for folks to sell their own stuff, used stuff, whatever... Has anyone done anything like that where I could look at it? Thx for all the help anyone can provide me... I really do appreciate it. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ interchange-users mailing list suppressed http://www.icdevgroup.org/mailman/listinfo/interchange-users
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