Questions about Satchmo in production: admin customization, order processing
John Hensley
hoping that some of you who've gotten to production can comment on how
the store owners deal with day-to-day administration.
My big question is: how much custom admin work have you had to do?
Does the Django admin work for store staff, or do you find you've had
to write custom product and order management tools?
Product variations, in particular, took me a little while to figure
out. Bruce's screencast helped, but I can't help thinking that non-
technical store owners are going to have a hard time with this. I
started thinking of ways to further improve the admin, but now I'm
wondering if other developers are skipping right past this stage and
just updating inventory from spreadsheets or ERP systems?
Order management is my other big question mark. My client wants to
accept orders for out-of-stock items, so we have to authorize and
capture separately. Has anyone unchecked "Capture Payment" and
provided tools for the store owner to capture or cancel later? It
looks like it would just take some modifications to the payment
processors, some new order status values, and making sure cancelled
orders' quantities are returned to stock.
There's nothing too daunting about any of that, but it surprises me
that it's not already in. Is this unusual among the live Satchmo
stores? I wouldn't have thought so, but either my assumptions about
how they're actually run are naive (likely the case), or the owners
are doing a lot of manual work in multiple systems, or they've got
custom tools that haven't made it back to the project.
If I'm not misreading the situation (or TFM or the source), I'm happy
to implement what we'll need and submit patches, but I thought I'd ask
before I went off solving problems experienced store owners aren't
having. :^)
Thanks,
John