OXID eSales Blog

OXID Commons 2010: Call for Papers ends on March 15th

Marco Steinhaeuser — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:00:00 +0100

The 2nd OXID Commons will take place, in Freiburg i.Br., Germany, May 6-7, 2010.

Everyone who is interested in all things Open Source ecommerce and OXID eSales products such as OXID eShop is highly welcome to attend. Including for example shop owners, users, developers, solution partners, integration partners and of course OXID staff.

You all are invited to propose talks for the first day of OXID Commons, May 6th, and can expect a highly valuable program. Please note that the Call for Papers ends on March 15th so don't hesitate sending us the abstract for your talk.

There will be a Get Together in the evening of May 6th, where you can recap the day and do some networking.

For the first time, OXID Commons will be complemented by OXID Unconference, which takes place May 7th 2010. Join to discuss, debate and explore the secrets of eCommerce with OXID eShop in an open unconference setting.

Go mobile with your OXID eShop with apps for iPhone and Android

Marco Steinhaeuser — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:53:00 +0100

OXID eShop merchants can now offer their products to mobile purchasers via branded apps for smartphones made by mobilemojo.

Free Application for Internet shoppers

OXID eShop merchants can offer their products to mobile purchasers via branded apps for smartphones made by mobilemojo. The application communicates with the backend of OXID eShop 4 through an XML interface to synchronize product and customer data. Purchasers can browse the product range of OXID eShops with their cell phones in an easy and intuitive way. "In the age of networked communications, the customer is no longer tied to the PC at home. More and more activities of daily living can be done while mobile - this is the future of shopping." says Robert Rieser, partner at mobilemojo.

Intuitive to use - multiple payment options

The mobile shopping application has both text and category search functionality. It provides products in a list view; product details include information about variants, availability and ordering. In the checkout process, purchasers can see the item prices and shipping charges as they appear in the online store at their PC. Payment methods can be chosen by the merchant. Cash in advance, direct debit, invoice or PayPal are available. The customer account has a login and a register function. In addition to these basic functions, the iPhone and Android applications can be individually extended by specific content, functions and services.

Buy cinema and bus tickets with your mobile phone

"mobilemojo combines proven web technology with innovative mobile approaches. Using our software, online merchants get a branded app to provide mobile shopping to their customers - regardless of location and time" Roland Fesenmayr, CEO of OXID eSales AG says. Fesenmayr adds: "Unlike smartphone website templates, that often display the online store only in a different view, the app opens up opportunities to expand the eCommerce business model by enabling innovative additional services. Think of location based booking of cinema tickets, buying public transport tickets with a cell phone, linking one's own product catalog with barcode scanning or simply a pizza delivery service configurator".

Available from March 10th

The mobile shopping applications by mobilemojo will be available from March 10th as two products: Base and an Enterprise Edition for owners of OXID eShop 4. The Enterprise version provides additional tailoring to the customer enhancements and individual adjustments to the distribution structure of the online merchant.

Basic functions of Mobile Shopping Application Overview

For iPhone version 3.1and higher and Android version 1.6 and higher
Connection to the backend of OXID eShop 4
Global search
Category Search
Overview, including product image and price
Product details including pictures, product information and variants
Standalone checkout process within the application
Login and transfer of customer data
Register new customers
Checkout via PayPal, credit card and direct debit available
Customer-scale prices
Delivery Status Indicator

New article on PHPbuilder.com - PHP Module Programming with OXID eShop CE

Marco Steinhaeuser — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:42:13 +0100

Recently, a new technical tutorial was published on PHPbuilder.com: introducing module coding by using the OXID eShop framework.

Andreas Ziethen, an OXID Premium Solution Partner for many years and author of this article, starts by describing the installation process of OXID eShop on a server. The article continues with a basic description of the OXID eShop software architecture, namely its:

MVC implementation
template system
module interface

He furthermore provides helpful hands-on instructions on how to access the module APIs to tweak the built-in content management system of OXID eShop.

Concluding the article, Andreas states:

This simple example should illustrate that OXID offers a sophisticated framework for customizing every aspect of a merchant site.

Thank you Andreas for the good job!

oxchkversion v3 Released: Enhanced Consistency Checking Tool for OXID eShop Upgrades

Ralf Trapp — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:24:09 +0100

OXID eSales' support department often helps administrators that have issues when patching or updating OXID eShop to a latest release. I remember the days back when I was an OXID Partner and I once called support with this kind of problem. I was absolutely sure I had transfered every single file of the new software version. Well, support proved the opposite.

After I joined OXID I created the first version of a consistency checking tool labeled oxchkversion to never make this happen again. The tool worked pretty well, but had some issues itself. In the beginning, it could not detect the difference between an OXID eShop which was patched cleanly and a shop which was screwed up. For shops which were installed from scratch it worked well. For those which ran for longer, it detected more and more update errors on each patch/update. Of course, for the tool to be useful, something had to change.

We later defined these requirements for a new version of oxchkversion:

It should detect reliably if a shop is a "clean" installation or not – even if some files originated from earlier installations. As long as these files were not released anew, they have to detect as OK.
The tool should give useful hints if mismatches were detected.
It should catalogue everything which was released.
It should create and maintain a database of checksums for each file easily and in one step during new releases.

With these requirements in mind, we started work on version 2, which we used only for testing purposes within our support department. Pretty soon, we knew what had to be improved and we started to develop a new major public release. The result: You can now download oxchkversion v3 for free at OXID eXchange.

Basic Architecture

The shiny new oxchkversion consists of three parts:

A Web service which is queried for answers about specific checksums.
A MD5 database which is hosted by OXID eSales. This database contains MD5 checksums of every piece of software we release for distribution.
oxchkversion.php itself; all in one file.

How It’s Used

Version 3 of oxchkversion works just like v1 and v2: Just copy oxchkversion.php to the root directory of OXID eShop and open it in a browser (e.g. http://www.youroxideshop.com/oxchversion.php).

Then:

It detects your eShop edition, version, and revision from OXID eShop.
It collects all the files which reside in shop and computes MD5 checksums for each php and tpl file.
It then connects to the webservice and transmits this information for each file:
- Filename to be checked
- MD5 checksum
- Version detected
- Revision detected
- Edition detected

When running oxchkversion, this is the kind of output it provides:

If the checksum matches the shop edition, version and revision, a file is marked OK. When this happens, no other information is printed.
If the checksum does not match shop but is recognized as part of OXID eShop, the file is marked version mismatch.
If the checksum does not match shop but is known as a file which has been in shop at any previous time, it's also marked as version mismatch. This means: Files which were in shop in ancient times but are not in there anymore are detected as version mismatch.
Totally unknown files are ignored.

All files which were detected as not OK are printed out in a list. A details link leads to more information:

filename,
MD5 checksum,
from which package the file came from and
what package contained a newer release of this file.

That’s it! I hope you like OXID's consistency checking tool and it’s useful for your daily work with OXID eShop.

Roadmap for OXID eShop 4.3.0: Mostly community-driven features planned

Ralf Trapp — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:55:39 +0100

Happy New Year! Now that the holidays are over, I want to talk about the plans for the next major release of OXID eShop.

Thanks to the newly introduced feature request tool, we now have metrics for gauging the community's wishes and so this marks the first mostly community-developed roadmap. Of course, number of votes wasn't the only criteria the team took into account: When we introduced the tool at the Partners Day 2009, some decisions were made together with the partners taking part in this workshop.

Please note that this roadmap is always subject to change. OXID eShop version 4.3.0 will include the following enhancements:

In some countries (e.g. USA, Japan, Canada), the address format contains a field for entering the state/province. Payment services like PayPal treat this field as mandatory, and may refuse payment if no value is set for state/province. On Partners Day, we were told by several shop owners that delivered to these countries that this is critical functionality for them. In OXID eShop 4.3.0, consumers will be able to choose their state/province from the order process in the shop front end and this field will be available to be handed over to any interface.
Our highest rated request was to "Add the possibility to upload one base picture". In order to implement this request, and close bug #1550 (Icons are not generated when pictures are uploaded via FTP), the new version will prompt the shop administrator to upload the picture with the highest resolution first, and all other picture sizes will be calculated from this one by default. Alternatively, it will be possible to upload a different picture for any other size if you wish.

Excluding products and categories from vouchers has not been possible until now and will be introduced with version 4.3.0 of OXID eShop as requested. At first glance, this functionality looks low priority, but it becomes really essential when dealing with legal stuff like book price control.
During the last year, forum users very frequently asked how to switch off special parts of the front end from the admin panel without touching the templates. As agreed at Partners Day, options will be included in the admin panel for switching the following design blocks off or on: OpenID, Partners and Seals, credits and OXID logo in footer, Compare Products, Recommend Products, Listmania, Wishlists, Gift Registry, Social Bookmarks and Price Alert.
Another piece of functionality requested and chosen on Partners Day is "Put more than one product from the product list view into the basket with a single click". This feature doesn't need functional changes in OXID eShop, the templates themselves would have to be adapted. Since this may affect the clear template structure, it seems safer to implement this as an extension.
At the moment, a field for an European Article Number (EAN) is provided in OXID eShop which is not very useful outside of Europe. In order to clear this up, an additional input option for other article numbers will be implemented. This feature was also suggested and decided upon on Partners Day.
When it comes to "intelligent search" enterprise shopping cart features - like FACT-Finder provides - it becomes essential to increase turnover. With the new upcoming version of a related OXID eFire module, we will provide three more templates for an optimized display of the (after) search results as well as automatic search result optimization. Also, when using the FACT-Finder black box in-house instead of the hosted solution, the ability to access the internals of the black box will be provided from now on.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Google's Webmaster Central Blog announced "Rich Snippets" last year. OXID eShop will support that using RDFa from version 4.3.0 on. Not only do Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance, they also most importantly boost your search engine optimization if you use Rich Internet Applications (RIA).
All demo data in OXID eShop database have been translated into English. After choosing the English language in the setup routine of version 4.3.0, the shop comes up with English as the default language.
Also, we have solved some painful issues with the setup procedure, especially the well-known problems with .htaccess and file permission issues while installing on some operating systems.
For quality management of OXID eShop's code functionality we use PHPUnit, a framework that makes the writing of tests easy as well as the functionality to easily run the tests and analyze their results. Up to now, we haven't published our Unit Test code because tests for the different editions had not been separated yet. With 4.3.0 and onwards, we will support developers by making our PHPUnit tests available to the public.

Recap of 2009 - One Year Being Open Source

Marco Steinhaeuser — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 09:40:37 +0100

For a software vendor such as OXID eSales, going Open Source is not simply about opening up the source code of your product. Coming from a proprietary business and development model, it also affected our company's philosophy, our culture, and our relationships with our clients, users and partners. Obviously, these changes are still ongoing. They take quite a while and we regard them as long-term processes.

Of course, we anticipated much of this; we hoped that a community would grow around our product, transforming it into a genuine community project with diverse contributors reporting bugs, coding extensions, fixes and add-ons and offering related products and services. We truly believe that "it's the better way to produce code", as our CEO, Roland, likes to say. Looking back from today, we find it very difficult to remember not being open source.

We achieved some really impressive milestones in 2009. We launched two major releases, 4.1.0 and 4.2.0 of OXID eShop. We had to find solutions to make the update procedures easier and started talking about important changes on the dev-general mailing list months before release to ensure changes would not be counter-productive for modules and interfaces. The first steps towards cumulative updates were made as well as improvements of the template concept. Expect steady improvements in these procedures to come up in 2010. You can participate on the dev-general list, to make sure we don't break compatibility for your modules.

We are still researching into the possibility of implementing the Zend Framework for OXID eShop. A spike solution can be found in the official SVN, deeper research is ongoing. Please see the Wiki to find out how you can help.

We are excited about the new roadmap. It is the first forward looking document with significant contributions from outside OXID eSales. One of the most important new policies will be that we will supplement our regular quality reports with regularly published Unit Tests. We believe that for open source web-based software, publishing Unit Tests is as important as publishing source code. Watch out for an upcoming blog post for more information. You can submit features to add to the roadmap on the feature request tool.

In the last year, our highest priority has been increasing collaboration and dialog within the OXID community. In order to accomplish this, we have been busy launching new tools for OXID developers and users to collaborate better with the rest of the community. Our first project was replacing our outdated forum with a more modern solution. This has been a major success, as the OXID forum community is now very agile, active, friendly, and capable of working at every technical level, from end-user support all the way up to the deepest technical levels of development.

We also launched OXIDforge, a community lab containing tutorials, security bulletins and the roadmap. We are especially proud of the developer collaboration platform recently included in OXIDforge. If you haven't stopped by and looked around, we invite you to do so. I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the amount of knowledge and support for OXID developers.

Once you've used the tools and community on OXIDforge to develop an extension, you still need to get it into the hands of users. To help with this, we've introduce OXID eXchange, a marketplace for OXID eShop modules. As with any other products add-on site or app store, it will be a user's first stop when seeking additional functionality with OXID eShop.

We are very excited that these early efforts are already accelerating the trend of developers joining our community. We know first hand that a steady flow of new developers is the lifeblood of any open source project, and by this measure, we are growing strong indeed!

This year, community members have contributed OXID eShop localizations for Australian English, Portuguese and Slovenian languages as well as several new i18n tutorials on OXIDforge and many language modules uploads to OXID eXchange. Many people with experience with other shopping cart systems started engaging with OXID eShop's architecture and sharing their good ideas in the forums and on the dev-general mailing list.

Although the community is pretty young, live community events are already taking place. During OXID Commons, probably the most outstanding event, more than 300 people arrived, representing many different roles in the community. User group meetings like the LAHNPARTY in Weilburg and the Swiss OXID User Group are becoming regular, and provide excellent bonding among new and tentative users. We also had a great time at our OXID Partners Day in October, where companies involved in selling products and services around OXID eShop met to collaborate. Of course, OXID eSales also took part in many broader community conventions and fairs like OSMB (where we won the OSMB award), Community Leadership Summit, OSCON, LinuxTag, Cebit, DMEXCO and MOW.

We are looking forward to 2010 and another exciting year of being open source and want to thank everybody who spent time and energy moderating the forums, contributing code, ideas, translations and wiki texts and everyone else that is taking part in building an active community. Merry Christmas to everybody and a Happy New Year!

OXIDlab launched

Ralf Trapp — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:39:24 +0100

Today we launched first application of OXIDlab at OXID eXchange.

OXIDlab is where we publish prototypes or test implementations, which are prepared by our teams. These results of our daily work are very often the first steps to new features for our products. Sometimes they just stay experimental. However, feel free to use it for your own purposes and if you like you can even join us in developing them at http://dev.oxidforge.org/.

Consider software in OXIDlab as being experimental for early product development. We just want to share with you - from developers for developer. If you like it, please vote for it to show, that we should include it into OXID eShop standard software.

Posted by:

Ralf Trapp, Head of Development

Michael Keiluweit, Development

Collaboration Platform for Developing OXID Extensions

Marco Steinhaeuser — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:05:45 +0100

We are happy to announce a web-based project management and collaboration platform for developers of open source extensions and more for OXID eShop.

The collaboration platform is located at http://dev.oxidforge.org and provides a lot of useful tools available to each extension development project:

Mailing Lists
Surveys
Forums
Task Management
SVN/CVS-Support
FTP-Support
Documentation Management

For developing OXID eShop, we already have such systems in place and won't switch to the new collaboration platform. Instead, all the built-in features on the platform are intended to work solely for your specific project. You - as a project owner - can decide yourself which features to use or not.

I used the word "project" here, because it could mean very different things. Of course, the tool was originally made for complete software projects (including their modules and extensions) but it works just as well for language and localization packs, themes, off-line tools, interfaces, and other extensions and optional modules. Also, it would be a great place to find patches or hacks before the official release.

When creating a new project, after approval, you will receive two e-mails. The first contains some instructions, the second is your project's mailing list subscription notification. Be aware that creation of a URL for your project page (such as http://myproject.dev.oxidforge.org) may take up to 24 hours to propagate through DNS (the Domain Name Service).

OXIDforge has now become a real collaboration platform. The clear advantage of this new functionality is it facilitates working in teams - work shared is work halved. Even if the developer of a module, for time or other reasons, cannot support his own module any longer, he could hand it over to another person from the community.

If you want more visibility and awareness for your stable extension, you are welcome to upload it to the OXID eXchange application.

Please note that the collaboration platform is currently in beta. Should you encounter any problems, please file and issue.

As "collaboration platform" obviously is much too long, we still search for a proper name for it like "dev-zone". Do you have any suggestions? Please feel free to leave a comment, contact us via the dev-general mailing list or write to the forums.

OK, enough said. Feel free to register your project to start developing for OXID eShop on OXIDforge. The only criteria is that it must be under an Open Source license.

Let's collaborate!

OXID Partners Day 2009: Commercial Open Source in Full Swing

Andrea Seeger — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:10:26 +0100

The fifth annual OXID Partners Day took place last Tuesday the 27th of October at Freiburg, Germany and it was an awesome event. More than 150 partners, with whom we're working very closely together, attended to talk about the future OXID business roadmap and discuss what’s important. Most of them were OXID Solution Partners, certified by OXID. These Partners implement customer projects and develop extensions for OXID eShop.

First year into open source a full success

Roland Fesemayr, the OXID CEO, started with a summary about one year commercial open source. Back in 2008, when we transitioned from a proprietary to an open-source business model, several people asked us if we’re crazy going this step? Nevertheless, we were convinced that being open source is the better way to develop software and the better way to distribute software. One year later, we see that this is definitely true!

We experience daily that open source is the best way to improve software quality and speed of development. Customers have a completely transparent view inside the system, can use it for commercial business and are free in their decision to use our open source edition (OXID eShop Community Edition) or our supported commercial products (OXID eShop Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition). Additionally, less effort in marketing/distribution allows us to invest more in product development.

Especially enterprise businesses are highly interested in open source software. Some main reasons are:

avoiding vendor lock-in
worldwide community with product-related expertise
proven better quality of software
... which severs as an optimal basis to build custom solutions
freedom of Do-It-Yourself (DIY)
and of course the rapid pace of innovation

The eCommerce operating system

Roland pointed out OXID's vision of the eCommerce operating system, which provides modularized functionality to meet the requirements of future business models. In future eCommerce solutions, on-premise shop systems such as OXID eShop will serve as an application platform tightly integrated with a cloud-based repository of extensions. With OXID eFire, we already have this infrastructure available which enables shop owners to get access to the eCommerce service cloud right now.

Growing complexity of eCommerce projects

Our Head of Sales, Michael Benz, gave a detailed presentation about common challenges for our partners as well as OXID in today's eCommerce market. He furthermore informed participants about the updated OXID sales strategy.

In sum, eCommerce projects are getting larger and more complex. Our partners will increasingly have to focus on professional project management. Particularly the requirements of system integration and the modeling of automized processes becomes important. Actually, eCommerce projects are always mission critical. Any solution failure is expensive!

The OXID key accounting staff provides close teamwork to support partners in their sales process. The technical certification of the OXID partners is an important instrument to ensure the quality of customer projects and is now also available in English language for our international partners!

Manufacturers and wholesalers start selling online

Michael also pointed out, that we have more and more manufacturers and wholesalers opting for OXID products, who start to do direct sales via eCommerce. Here, detailed multi channel concepts are in demand.

Open by default fosters a win-win situation for everyone

Myself, Andrea Seeger, Executive Board Member, gave an overview of the strategy, roadmap and product portfolio of OXID eShop. With our focus on quality we experienced some shift of mindset since going open source, because we commited ourselves to deliver quality, speed and ….. transparency. Hence, we introduced a completely open bugbase and a public quality report.

Our view concerning bugs did indeed change. Whereas in former days bugs were unwelcome and disturbing, bugs are nowadays an instrument to improve our software. By the way: the total amount of open bugs had been squased down to 29 up until Partners Day!

Our development team did change their attitude in terms of transparency: Before going open source, everything that wasn’t public was confidential. Today, everything that’s not explicitly confidential is public. OXID is open by default.

We’ve reached to involve the OXID Community into the development process as well as in questions of concepts and feature requests. This allows the community to participate actively in shaping the future of OXID eShop. Given that OXID eSales regards itself as a provider of commercial open source software, it will define the overall direction and a common frame for further enhancing OXID eShop.

Within the commercial open source model everybody is a winner! Enterprise customers and licensees benefit from the advantages of an open source product just as much as from the advantages of a commercial product with vendor support and warranity. Open source users can utilize our software for free, while at the same time they benefit from the quality management an open source vendor such as OXID ensures.

OXID eShop 4.2.0 released

The actual release of OXID eShop 4.2.0 was launched during Partners Day and OXID Partners were the first ones who got the news.

Enhanced social commerce and internationalization on future roadmap

The further big topics regarding product development are the enhancement of B2B functionality and internationalization. We’re working on a redesign of the frontend, whereby community input is welcome! After having released the Web 2.0 package with the version 4 of OXID eShop, we’re now working on the adaption or integration of social commerce and social marketing scenarios.

New mobile extensions

In fact, there were 3 mobile extensions to OXID eShop presented by our partners at the Partners Day:

One realy awesome OXID app, which can be accessed by Apples appstore through mobilemojo www.mobilemojo.de
Some simple to use, and terrific designed mobile templates by digidesk iphone.probesystem.de
and the mobile shop from MOS-Tangram based on OXID eShop demoshop.mos-tangram.com

Each partner who has some ideas of social extensions to OXID eShop is very welcome to talk to us or just to upload the extension to OXID eXchange. Of course, we’ll promote high quality enhancements to OXID eShop!

Releasing Unit Tests and implementing Zend Framework integration

That’s a good bridge to the next topic: quality assurance and support for community and partner developers. We decided to make all Unit Tests public, which allows to develop more valuable extensions, by checking them about side effects in the core system. Zend Framework will be adapted in a first step. Find the results of the public discussion about ZF in OXIDforge.

There are some more topics on the roadmap for 2010, which will be discussed in the OXID forum or at OXIDforge furthermore.

SOA and mash-up architecture

And referring to the speech of Roland, the R&D team is working on the future eCommerce system, by modularizing the system and giving access to objects via SOA architecture. OXID eShop will become the application platform to fit the demands of future eCommerce models, business models which are characterized by an intensive networking and a mash-up architecture.

Multitude of extensions available through OXID eXchange

Ralf Trapp, Head of Development, gave a review and update to OXID eXchange, the marketplace for extensions to OXID eShop. The platform is provided by OXID to give a distribution platform to the variety of enhancements to OXID eShop. It’s a promotion platform for each partner and community developer, and a lot of extensions have already been uploaded.

Get your extensions certified by OXID

Partners have the possibility to certify their extensions and because of quality assurance, OXID can recommend certified extensions more prominently. Ralf pointet out the process of how to certifiy an extension and provided the contact address for interested developers: modulecertification@oxidesales.com. More info about extensions certification is available on our website (yet, German only).

Developer-related information and soon a collaboration platform at OXIDforge

OXIDforge, so to say the factory for community developers, offers more and more tools. OXIDforge is the information hub for partner and community developers and the direct connection to the OXID developer team. Via the mailinglist dev-general, discussion and decisions about further functionality are being discussed and the setup of a collaboration platform á la Sourceforge is in progress. OXIDforge provides an archive of all downloads, tutorials, tools & tipps and a blog aggregator. Everybody has the chance and is especially invited to participate at OXIDforge, to publish his expertise and to get involved in discussions about the further development of OXID eShop.

A primer on OXID eFire - eCommerce in the cloud

Our second major product OXID eFire was presented by Caroline Helbing, Productmanager OXID eFire. Caroline showcased some recent success stories and gave an outlook on 2010. Think of OXID eShop as the fully customizable on-premise shop software and OXID eFire as the gateway to the eCommerce cloud that easily allows to plug in extensions.

To do successful eCommerce one of the major triggers is the integration of the best and specialized eCommerce services. Whilst OXID eShop provides a max at customizing and supporting an individual Corporate Identity as well as functional demands; OXID eFire provides highly standardized and optimized services and processes. In this respect, shop owners rely on standards and the benefits of economies of scale by combining OXID eShop and OXID eFire.

Please note that OXID eFire is currently only available to the German
market. We are in the process of leveraging its tremendous benefits to
shop owners world-wide. Find more information about OXID eFire in German.

New OXID eFire functionality: Webmiles, Creditpass, Factfinder and more

Caroline demonstrated some OXID eFire functionality and keys to success, such as:

The perfect integration of the bonus system Webmiles, which can be configured individually in regard to product portfolio and customer target group and has a direct effect on increasing sales.
Easily live up to the “Place your products where your customers are!” mantra: Shop owners can easily distribute product information to various marketplaces and price comparison platforms through OXID eFire. A dynamically generated article filter ensures that there will never be a product offered at a third-party market platform which is out of stock.
Smart boni checks via the OXID eFire Portlet Creditpass minimize the payment risk, by being able to offer all available payment methods.
The OXID eFire Portlet Factfinder offers an onsite search which results in a measurable increase of orders and shopping cart size - simply because customers honor product search with valuable search results! There’s never a zero result, and customers get some results even if they make some writing mistakes or use other words to describe the product.

Dedicated OXID eFire for large enterprises and SOAP interface

To fit the requirements of large enterprise companies OXID eFire offers an individual adaption to OXID eFire – these projects will be setup by the OXID key accounter.

The enhancement of the SOAP interface between OXID eShop and eFire will offer various possibilities for service providers to integrate their products.

Partners presented 13 solutions

Last slot before the lunch break was provided by some OXID partners in quite sporty discipline: 13 solutions were presented in 5 minutes for each one. Nevertheless our partners succeeded in presenting their solution in a comprehensive way!

Workshops and QA session provide first-hand information

After the lunch break we had four comprehensive workshops on sales, extension development and certification, and a QA session about OXID eShop and OXID eFire.

The results were presented afterwards, and I was very impressed about this rich feedback we could collect from our partners – thank you for this!

I joined the sales workshop, which was crowded with about 70 people. To be honest, I sat in the last row and wanted to prepare something for the evening event – but this wasn’t possible! The workshop was so interesting, the discussions so open and exciting. During the workshop we developed lots of new ideas and projects for further collaboration – some of them are quick to realize, some of them need more time, and some of them – these are the best ones – are in progress already!

Presentations of OXID eFire Partners highlighting new Portlets

Nafissa Khayar, OXID eFire Customer Success Manager, moderated the presentations of the eFire partners, who gave detailed insight into their OXID eFire Portlets.

Partners exhibiting during the event

After a never-ending discussion and question time, the talks passed over to the lobby and the cool beer to use the last chances to visit the exhibitors at their booth, who demonstrated their specialized eCommerce services.

OXID eShop Best Solution Award and party time

The point of culmination was celebrated after the location change to the airport restaurant, where the evening got very late by networking, dancing and celebrating and of course the prize giving ceremony of OXID eShop Best Solution Award!

The award winners and their solutions will be presented in my next blogpost – coming soon!

Meanwhile please enjoy the slideshow to get some impressions of the OXID Partners Day 2009 view slideshow at flickr

Sincerely
Andrea

Open feature request tool - your voice is welcome!

Marco Steinhaeuser — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:50:45 +0100

Ralf Trapp, our Head of Development, announced on OXID's Partner Day that we set up an open feature request tool on http://oxid.uservoice.com. This tool is intended to collect all the good ideas from the community that will help us to make OXID eShop even better and attractive. Most of the already gathered ideas from the feature request forums have already been transfered.

How does it work?

Everybody has got 10 voices. You can spend up to 3 voices on the feature request that you want to have implemented in the standard installation. For example, you can vote for 3 features you would like to see implemented most using 3 voices and 1 voice for a feature that you find less important. Also, it is possible to enter a new feature request by filling in the form. The feature request tracker will first try to find a similar feature. If none of the already entered feature requests fit your needs, you are requested to define a new one. Now try to inspire as many people as possible about your idea by posting a comprehensible title and description.

Please note that a couple of new features were already accepted in a workshop on Partner Day. This feature requests were marked as planned.

Guidelines for adding feature requests

After discussing intensely about Ralf's announcement to accept user requests also in German language, we decided to run it a different way: Those who feel unable to read or write in English may discuss their ideas in the German feature request forums and ask other users to take them over to the new feature tracker tool. Maintaining the main tracker for feature requests in English will benefit everyone in our international community. Please understand that for this reason new feature requests in a different language than English will be declined and comments in a different language than English will be deleted.
Please choose the headline wisely: A topic like "New Feature" wouldn't help anybody.
Also, give as much information as you can: Our developers need a precise description of what to implement and how. If you need more space for your explanation or maybe drawings, feel free to use the OXIDforge Wiki and link to it from the feature request entry.
Separate the your feature requests clearly. For example: "Allow rest credits on Vouchers" has nothing to do with the original topic "Voucher exclusion for products" although it is somehow related to vouchers. In doubt, don't hasitate to create a new feature request.
Please have in mind, that this tool is only tended to gather feature requests for OXID eShop. Please no bug entries and no feature requests for other products (e.g. OXID eFire). If in doubt, ask in the forums.
OXID cannot give any assurance whether or when a feature will be implemented. The highest rated features have a good chance to enter the official roadmap.

Alright, let's start working with this great tool! Hope you like it!