CSS, Admin pages, Product Search, NHibernate, Documentation discussion.

[Mike Hadlow]

Forwarded to group.

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Graham Scott <gho...@gmail.com>
To: Mike Hadlow <mikeh...@yahoo.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 4, 2009 12:09:22 PM
Subject: Suteki

Hi Mike

I just wanted to say that I'm very impressed with Suteki so far - I've not really had to touch the codebase at all yet, and have a lot of functionality for the e-commerce build I wanted already in place.

There are a few things that I wanted to mention however, and perhaps if you're in agreement with me on them I could join the project and help get things changed around or implemented?

Anyway, here goes:

• I think that the css stylesheet is a bit confusing when starting out. The site is very tightly-coupled (in a style sense!) to the JTG site, which makes it arduous to sort out to begin with. I think that a possible solution to ease this would be to have separate stylesheets for the site and the admin pages, which would help people to work out what they could safely change without cascading breaking styles. Coupling a (very) simple template with the separate stylesheets (I'm thinking bare bones site skeleton here) would make it easy for people to reskin the site as they see fit.
• I think that a separate Admin.Master page would be useful - the admin menu and stylesheet could be added to just this page, keeping it properly compartmentalised. This would also enable people to have a totally separate style for the admin section, which would be useful if they'd implemented a radical main site design.
  
• I couldn't find any Product Search functionality. Am I being thick, or is it not implemented? I'm more than happy to work on this and add it in if need be.
• What's the deal with LTS and nHibernate? Is the site in the process of being ported? I found this really confusing to be honest, although I have not spent much time on it really, seeing as I've not needed to change any code yet!
• I think the project would really benefit from a SharpArchitecture style "Getting Started" document. I'm happy to contribute this once I have a thorough understanding of how everything's built, but I think that that's some way off yet ;)

Anyway, I hope that you don't see the above as criticism, I think you've made an excellent framework here! I'd love to get involved if you have anythign for me to do on it :)

Cheers

Graham

[Mike Hadlow]

> I just wanted to say that I'm very impressed with Suteki so far - I've not
> really had to touch the codebase at all yet, and have a lot of functionality
> for the e-commerce build I wanted already in place.
>
> There are a few things that I wanted to mention however, and perhaps if
> you're in agreement with me on them I could join the project and help get
> things changed around or implemented?

Thanks Graham, I'm very pleased that you like Suteki Shop so far :)

> Anyway, here goes:
>
>    - I think that the css stylesheet is a bit confusing when starting out.

>    The site is very tightly-coupled (in a style sense!) to the JTG site, which
>    makes it arduous to sort out to begin with. I think that a possible solution
>    to ease this would be to have separate stylesheets for the site and the
>    admin pages, which would help people to work out what they could safely
>    change without cascading breaking styles. Coupling a (very) simple template
>    with the separate stylesheets (I'm thinking bare bones site skeleton here)
>    would make it easy for people to reskin the site as they see fit.

>    - I think that a separate Admin.Master page would be useful - the admin

>    menu and stylesheet could be added to just this page, keeping it properly
>    compartmentalised. This would also enable people to have a totally separate
>    style for the admin section, which would be useful if they'd implemented a
>    radical main site design.

I agree about the CSS design. It's definately one of the poorer parts
of Suteki Shop. Any input you have would be welcome. I think the idea
of splitting the CSS into 'skin' and 'structure' parts (must be better
names) is great.

One think I don't like about a lot of eCommerce applications are the
separate user and admin sites. I wanted Suteki Shop to be more like a
wiki, where the administrator simply gets extra features and can edit
things in-place. Because there aren't really separate admin and user
sites it doesn't make sense to have separate styles or an admin master
page.

>    - I couldn't find any Product Search functionality. Am I being thick, or

>    is it not implemented? I'm more than happy to work on this and add it in if
>    need be.

No, there is no Product Search functionality. A patch would be most
welcome :) What's your opinion about how to implement it? Would you
simply use the Google API, or would you search the DB?

>    - What's the deal with LTS and nHibernate? Is the site in the process of

>    being ported? I found this really confusing to be honest, although I have
>    not spent much time on it really, seeing as I've not needed to change any
>    code yet!

Yes it is confusing. Suteki Shop uses LINQ-to-SQL. The Suteki.Common
project has been used in one of my commercial projects that used
NHibernate. A while back I merged lots of stuff from the commercial
project back into Suteki Shop including the NHibernate repository (and
the NHibernate dependencies it has). That's why you see NHibernate
dlls in the references for Suteki.Common.

My intention is to port Suteki Shop to NHibernate. But since it uses
LINQ throughout, I wanted to wait until the NHibernate-LINQ
implementation was mature enough to support it.

>    - I think the project would really benefit from a SharpArchitecture style

>    "Getting Started" document. I'm happy to contribute this once I have a
>    thorough understanding of how everything's built, but I think that that's
>    some way off yet ;)

That would be very nice :)

> Anyway, I hope that you don't see the above as criticism, I think you've
> made an excellent framework here! I'd love to get involved if you have
> anythign for me to do on it :)

Not at all, criticism is *good*!

Patches are very welcome. I think you've made some excellent
suggestions. If you want to have a go at implementing any of them just
send the patch to the group. I'll check it out and add it in :)

Mike

[Graham Scott]

Hi Mike

I understand your points about the admin master page, but I'm still
kind of leaning towards it: it's just easier to have it seperate so
there's somewhere to add admin-specific functionality without having
if statements all over the place. For example I've just integrated the
Markdown editor into my build, so that some rich text functionality is
available in the CMS.

With regards to the css, I've currently got a very simple skeleton set
up on my build; I'll try at some point in the week to merge it with
what's in the trunk and send it over as a patch. It's certainly not
pretty, but I've removed a lot of unneccessary divs and made the xhtml
validate, so IMO it'll be a less confusing starting point for new
projects.

Good question about the search. I guess ideally we should support a
Google site search service as well as a basic search that maybe just
matches product names and descriptions. I'll have a look at this over
the next couple of days and get soemthing built.

Graham

[Mike Hadlow]

Hi Graham,

Thanks. I'm looking forward to seeing the patches :)

Mike

[Graham Scott]

Hi Mike

I've submitted a patch for a simple product search. The search service
takes a string query and runs it through a ISearchParser which
determines each of the separate terms in the query (at the moment the
concrete implementation just differentiates between single words and
words grouped with quote marks. It's very basic, but it seems to work
ok for my purposes, and is loosely-coupled enough for people to swap
out if the need to.

There's some unit tests for the search service and the parser, and an
extra method on the ProductController. I didn't want to amend the
views on this patch to add in a search box, so to see it running live
just use the URL:

http://[LOCALMACHINE]/shop/Product/search?query=[QUERY TERM]

Let me know your thoughts, or if I've missed anything and I'll get it
sorted.

I'll try to submit a patch with the skeleton html and css layouts
later in the week.

Cheers

Graham

[Mike Hadlow]

Thanks Graham,

I'll try and find time to check it out this weekend.

Mike