The world (and word) of jaymz

We’ve recently had to do some automatic posting of content to facebook from a wordpress blog. I did find this wordbook plugin but it apparently has broke recently and people have been complaining it no longer works (27 out of 27!). So I’ve rolled my own. It’s in a very early stage but the code seems to work ok.

Instructions (you’ll need to create a new application and then authorize that for your user) and code are all over at github. I can’t really tell if I’m “doing it right” but it’s working and is a start. Fork and be happy…

Updated I’ve now added in support to push the title to twitter. I’m currently working on hooking in Bit.ly support to add the short URL to the tweet. Code is pushed to GH.

More updates The twitter posting now uses the post tile + a bit.ly link to your blog permalink. I’ve decided it’s now worthy of v0.2!

I still get quite a few hits coming in for this. I’ve got it all up online and working again. I’ve added a redirect from the old link to the new home so wherever links to it are scattered about should magically rework again. The new home for the compare script.

sigh… Recently I have had to (more than once) explain why we’re choosing Django to develop a e-commerce & web app platform rather than using something off the shelf like Magento. I’ve heard lots of negative things regarding Magento and here’s what I’ve outlined in an email to PM’s etc which others might find useful if they have a similiar “justify it” experience.

The number one reason though I’d rather not work with Magento is that time and again developers express difficulty in making magento work for them and not their magento consultant.

Anywayz, I’m sure someone will take offense to this and I’m well aware I’m comparing a framework to a specific application but whatever…

Actually come to think of it, I’m not even comparing it really django, just listing some gripes and hate I’ve read/heard elsewhere

Code extension & extendability

June 2009 : pickledshark.com

This guy is basically critical of the codebase being complex and difficult to work with. He ends with this:

Due to the Zend/OOP/MVC influence on Magento it is impossible to follow the code. Classes are referenced dynamically, various aspects are contained in XML files and there is no clear flow that you can just debug through. The sheer volume of files and folders makes finding something unbelievably tedious.

Even the database is a minefield. In every other system I have used finding data is easy. In Magento, the use of EAV means that data is split amongst hundreds of abstract tables. Again, it doesn’t flow and it doesn’t make sense without a great deal of time developing a solid understanding of what they have done.

A final Cynical Note… Many people claim that the complexity of Magento is somewhat intentional. The profitability of Magento relys on consulting, technical support and installations. Making the codebase complex could mean that many developers will start out, get stuck and pay for help. If this is the intention of Varien then perhaps they have been very goal focused

Hmm…… Another post here says that for most bits that arent in the free or enterprise version you can probably find a plugin to do it for you at magento-connect. Here’s something you’d imagine would be useful “get the lowest price free” and there is an extension for it. Problem being its $150.
Lowest Price Free plugin

The comments that I find over & over are that the system itself is a nightmare to work from from a developer viewpoint unless you are some magento expert consulting for a fee (big surprise). Eg, here: (april 2009)

The big thing for me right now is the documentation(specifically around customization) – it is nearly non-existent. The forums have TONS more questions that(sic.) answers, most of the Wiki articles focus on simple store administration or VERY simple theme level customizations (via CMS pages or edits to layouts).

Multiple products with similiar data & attributes (eg sizes)

Last post 1 HOUR AGO!

A long discussion about how much of a ball-ache it is to manage multiple products that share a common base (i.e. different sizes of the same product). There is some talk about configurable products, grouped products etc but it seems that even all these still require duplication/entry of the same data per SKU:

This problem is driving me nuts! I have a shop to build with over 100,000 possibilities of one single configurable product. Now… Could anyone tell me, how exactly I am supposed to manage this? I just can’t seemto find anyone dumb enough to add those products manually and I’m certainly not doing it myself! This is magento’s great weakness!

AJAXifing Templates and core features

Last post 3 Weeks ago

Lots of talk here trying to work out how to add ajax functionality to the magento site and surprise surprise, its not supported out of the box and rather complex for most people to try and work out. Instead, well:
Vivendo has a great extension and it’s very affordable!

Whoop-ee! Who’s Vivendo? Oh yeah, the people that write the magento core.

PCI DSS Compliance / Gift Certs / Logging of admin data

For processing cards onsite your cart system should comply to the PCI-DSS regulations. Magento community does not and should be used in situations where you hand payment to another system like paypal or do not store card data on site if using a gateway. The Enterprise (the $8000/yr) system is scheduled to be certified to comply to PCI-DSS soon. Partly because the Enterprise version includes data encryption which the community one does not.

While a Django system would not be “out of the box” PCI-DSS compliant we would be writing the code to store attributes etc and would be able to add an encryption layer (such as 3DES or blowfish etc) to that data. It should also be noted that only the Enterprise edition supports admin logging, gift certs and some nice “extras” such as store credit.

Also the enterprise version is the only one to allow for a proper “walled garden” of catalogues so for example having a section of the store for dealers and not general public orders is not possible with the stock-standard magento. Its also not possible to have sub-admins (could only add new products for example) either something which the django admin site has out of the box (and is easily customizable/extended).

Compare magento versions

Licensing

This is valid at the moment Magento Licesnsing:
As such, you must disclose any changes you make to the OSL 3.0-licensed copyrighted works whenever you distribute Magento or make your Magento store or software available over the web to a third party.

We would probably require a commercial license for magento (i.e. enterprise) if we did not want to re-release any changes to core. Judging from the way people talk about working with magento you will probably end up having to modify core at some point. A Django solution would be completely our own code and even hacking django core, its licensed under BSD meaning commercial works need not release derivative works back to the original source branch.

BSD License Terms
Due to the extremely minimal restrictions of BSD-style licenses, software released under such licenses can be freely modified and used in proprietary (i.e., commercial) software for which the source code is kept secret.

Payment Systems

Magento may or may not support the gateway that we want to use. They have support for a lot (most with an additional fee for the module, seeing a pattern here?):

Supported magento payment systems

Paypal, google checkout, sagepay (protx) are supported with free/paid extensions. The protx one (updated for sage pay) is in beta at the minute and there are 3 pages worth of reviews pointing out problems people are having with it. This is an extra reason for concern for me personally – having to rely on a load of extensions written all by different people, some charged, some not just to get the core functioning. What happens if there’s a bug in one of them?

This is a great extension and have Just upgraded to latest version and now it dont work? Using vewrsion 1.3.1.1 beta.

Fin

Ok, thats probably enough for now. Main point being that this system is customisable – for a fee. If they are mainly concerned about linking systems together then they really need to understand that the data can come as and how they want it. If they want XML of all their orders based on a SKU then we can provide that. If they have custom systems or expect data in such a way then we will fit output to that schema! It still feels like they think magento is this software like microsoft office that is going to somehow solve a load of problems off the bat.

One of the main things for me is that Magento is a dual licensed, essentially paid for system with a big consultant/community that work to push magento. Django is an open source BSD licensed framework built for developers to develop web applications on. Django does not offer paid-for licensed versions, its in django’s interest to have as much and as transparent documentation as possible. For Magento its not quite in their interest to have that same level of documentation, something which seems to be reflected when you read about developers experiences trying to extend it. Invariably it ends with a “magento expert” doing the work or the person struggling to fix it and ending up hacking core or finding some extension that just about does what they want and they live with it.

I know I’m going to end up having some “out of the ordinary” use cases when it comes to discounts, cart functioning and products themselves and the idea of working with magento does not thrill me. When you see posts on stackoverflowasking if theres any other documentation but the source code for the ORM then alarm bells ring. Especially when you’re used to the sort of quality & thorough documentation django provides

End rant! So yeah, I’m not the worlds biggest fan of magento. And I’ve not even touched on the actual quantity & scale of the db tables it installs on a fresh version. Magento fanatics please keep your “its brilliant & you are a knob” mail to yourself.

I absolutely LOVE Trials2 from Indie developer Red Lynx. In fact, its the first game I’ve actually “gone out” and bought in a long time. I say “gone out”, its available on Steam. Anyway, one minor annoyance I had was that although the scores for people are available online and per-track in-game I found it a bit annoying clicking through each page when I got home to see if any of my scores had been beaten by friends.

So I knocked this up. Its quite simple, it uses a combination of cURL & xpath to grab the page for the 2 profiles you’re interested in and then simply loads those up into an array. I thought I’d beautify it a bit to fit in more with the Trials 2 site. You can check it out here (/code/comparetrialsprofile.php). It does what I’m most interested in – compare your global ranking per track with a mate. With bank holiday weekend coming up I might flesh it out a bit.

Some things I’d like to add would be over-all summaries and the ability to compare more than one person side by side – maybe grabbing the team members from the team page etc. Hopefully red lynx dont change the layout/format on their site Once again, kudos guys on an incredibly addictive/challenging/beautiful game.

I’ve defaulted it to me on the left & my mate that introduced me to Trials on the right (he’s jolly good).

Note: occasionally you might get a timeout and your browser will try and let you save the file – just reload

DOUBLE NOTE! As i’ve moved hosts I need to reconfigure this to run. So sorry, at the minute I need to dig out the old hdd as my helpful ex-host nuked my site when whilst they locked me out.