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    • How to get the shop up and running

    Posted by hman posts: 210

    I am still struggeling with the little sales corner (shop) I added to my Tiki Wiki (18.6).

    Besides numerous bugs (Paypal seems to be fed via an outdated API, manual payments with fractions are completely forgotten, half of the GUI isn't localized etc) there are still some fundamentals that I can't come to grips with.

    I have now managed to incorporate the Shop profile, although I did it "the hard way" (manual). Now it does behave exactly like the 18.x instance on show.tiki, where I did apply the profile. Besides from the bugs mentioned, I am a bit clueless about these topics:

    a) There is nothing to acquire the basic data from anonymous. There is a plugin shopper_info, which I could get to run so it asks the basic questions (name, address, phone, mail etc.). But where are the entries stored? They are stored, because upon revisit the data are preset in the input fields (leads to another question: How to reset this data, so anonymous #2 doesn't see the private data of #1, which would be a gross violation of GDPR.
    Where is the data, and how can it be integrated into an invoice? Unfortunately not even a small example of implementation of shopper_info is given...

    b) I find other bits and pieces. To me Cart looks like a project that got started, but was never finished, so it is WIP for about a decade or so.
    b1) What about http://doc.tiki.org/Shopping-Cart, which describes a data structure. Where are those data, how are they accessed, and how do they relate to other data structures?
    b2) What about http://doc.tiki.org/Shopping-Cart-Trackers, it describes trackers for Orders and Orders_Items, but they seem to be no part of the profile Shopping Cart?!
    On the instance on show.tiki that had the profile applied there is only one tracker (Products). But yet you can enter orders, which then creates payments. So these are stored somewhere, but not in a tracker...
    There are gift certification trackers, but nowhere to be found, classes for data etc. pp. et. al.
    b3) What about http://doc.tiki.org/OrderProfile which describes a profile consisting only of one small tracker.
    b2 and b3 claim to be used for Shopping Cart, but zhey do not seem to be part of it?
    c) There are plugins PluginCartMissingUserInfo, PluginExtendCartHold, PluginHasBought, PluginMemberPayment which are only barely described, also no exemplary implementation or hints given.

    But my "favourite" is

    d) http://doc.tiki.org/PluginCartMissingUserInfo

    Sounds promising at first: "Use this wiki plugin, introduced in Tiki7, to check the completeness of user input for a shopping cart or Payment transaction."

    But then it briefly describes just two parameters, and that's it. Since Tiki 7 no one ever managed to write a doc...

    All WIP. I wonder whether there is just one factual shop that is run with Tiki Wiki out there... At least one "proof of concept" or so...

    Thanks for your help
    Hman

    Reads: 2273
    Posted by Jonny Bradley posts: 126892 United Kingdom

    Hi Hman

    Well done for getting this far, it's a shame this is so neglected in Tiki. All that "advanced cart" and plugins for missing info stuff was dumped in tiki, as you say around v7, but was totally broken and mostly undocumented from the start, sadly our "wiki approach" to development sometimes is abused and i'm afraid this is one instance of that. We should really delete it all think...

    I have a couple of shops running and the profiles (originally called TikiKart) were based on the first of those, but i haven't been able to tend to it over the years and others have modified it since, not always for the better imho.

    I think (hope) i suggested to you that the built in payments and invoices system in Tiki was weird and also somewhat neglected and i use the PayPal "mini-cart" on my shopping tikis.

    Sorry this is also pretty well undocumented but briefly: Add your account email to thePayPal ID (and currency) then add a {paypal} plugin something like:

    Copy to clipboard
    {paypal' button_type="_cart" cart_action="add" item_name="The Thing" amount="42.99" item_number="item42" minicart="y"}


    (sorry, no time to test, and i usually hook in the version minicart i need in the custom look and feel javascript pref)

    Hope that helps, apologies for not having time to try and guide you in this direction earlier, we really need a developer with lots of time and motivation to clean all this up, but thanks for your interest, hopefully that will help eventually!

    Posted by hman posts: 210
    Jonny Bradley wrote:

    Sorry this is also pretty well undocumented but briefly: Add your account email to thePayPal ID (and currency) then add a {paypal} plugin something like:

    Copy to clipboard
    {paypal' button_type="_cart" cart_action="add" item_name="The Thing" amount="42.99" item_number="item42" minicart="y"}


    (sorry, no time to test, and i usually hook in the version minicart i need in the custom look and feel javascript pref)

    Hope that helps, apologies for not having time to try and guide you in this direction earlier, we really need a developer with lots of time and motivation to clean all this up, but thanks for your interest, hopefully that will help eventually!


    Thank you, I'll give this a try.

    I have to conclude that Tiki Wiki has grown beyond the code size that the current number of active developers can maintain, and lacks a version tracking of it's parts.

    What I really do not understand is, why when someone enters a new part which is unfinished, it gets carried on into a new main revision of Tiki even if it was never finished? How can that be? Unfinished parts should be a blocker! Any part should have to become at least release candidate. If there are parts of the code that did not reach this level, advancement should be stalled until all such parts have matured or been removed.

    I could understand this on non-LTS versions, but Tiki Wiki has had many LTS since 7... LTS cannot contain unfinished code. At least in my understanding of software engineering...

    Second issue to remark on: Tiki projects have been launched to extend the scope of Cart. Before the initial scope was fully implemented? That makes no sense...

    Posted by hman posts: 210
    Jonny Bradley wrote:
    Copy to clipboard
    {paypal' button_type="_cart" cart_action="add" item_name="The Thing" amount="42.99" item_number="item42" minicart="y"}


    Thanks, this works (kind of), after removing the stray quotation mark after paypal. It also copes with fractions, but three issues remain, one big, one semi-big and one small.

    The big is that the checkout button still doesn't work, which I attribute to a change of API by Paypal that no one coded into the sandbox interface of Tiki.

    The semi-big one is that the cart display is partially painted over the window and partially (lower left corner) under the (middle) window. Looks like this plugin is incompatible to classic tiki layout.

    The small one is that this GUI also ignores the Tiki setting of decimal commas and the trailing currency symbol for the euro.

    Posted by hman posts: 210
    hman wrote:
    Thanks, this works (kind of), after removing the stray quotation mark after paypal. It also copes with fractions, but three issues remain, one big, one semi-big and one small.


    One more remark: You used the undocumented parameter "button_type" and set it to "_cart". What else is in there that did not get documented (btw, the documentation isn't even alphabetically sorted, but that's a minor thing) ?

    Posted by hman posts: 210
    hman wrote:
    One more remark: You used the undocumented parameter "button_type" and set it to "_cart". What else is in there that did not get documented (btw, the documentation isn't even alphabetically sorted, but that's a minor thing) ?


    I just looked up the minicart thing, and found that
    a) the minicart in Tiki Wiki is version 2.5.0, which is two years older than the last version Jeff Harrell published (last is 3.0.6 at https://github.com/jeffharrell/minicart/commit/963129ff47927ade14886755f793a96bad859f8c) and even that is
    b) unsupported by Jeff Harrell since 2015...

    Posted by Jonny Bradley posts: 126892 United Kingdom
    hman wrote:

    I just looked up the minicart thing, and found that
    a) the minicart in Tiki Wiki is version 2.5.0, which is two years older than the last version Jeff Harrell published (last is 3.0.6 at https://github.com/jeffharrell/minicart/commit/963129ff47927ade14886755f793a96bad859f8c) and even that is
    b) unsupported by Jeff Harrell since 2015...


    Tiki 21+ uses the last version (3.0.6) and that works fine. I've just updated one of our shopping sites here to add international shipping with a tracker, a plugin customsearch and some javascript, hopefully i'll add some examples to doc.tiki.org osne day, maybe that will help?

    Oh, and please do improve the documentation where you see it isn't good enough rather than just complain about it - as you know, Tiki relies on volunteers to help!

    Posted by hman posts: 210
    Jonny Bradley wrote:

    Tiki 21+ uses the last version (3.0.6) and that works fine. I've just updated one of our shopping sites here to add international shipping with a tracker, a plugin customsearch and some javascript, hopefully i'll add some examples to doc.tiki.org osne day, maybe that will help?

    Oh, and please do improve the documentation where you see it isn't good enough rather than just complain about it - as you know, Tiki relies on volunteers to help!


    Thanks, maybe this will help. Please be so kind, since you have managed to make this run, to distill all what you had to modify into the Tiki code. Strip it of all that is only relevant to your site, generalize things etc.

    Especially regarding Paypal. Paypals documentation is abundant. Unfortunately the error message the sandbox spits out isn't, so it would be hard to find out why the sandbox no longer works (I assume that at some point in time it did).

    With respect to improving Tiki documentation, in order to do so I would have to reverse engineer the code... How could I document software I haven't written?

    Thanks
    Hman

    Posted by hman posts: 210

    Your page looks very nice and polished, congratulations.

    I took the liberty to look at the page source of your site. Well, in a way it does answer my question "where does the data go?", because every item you present on the grid has a basket icon that is an HTML FORM that communicates to Paypal, so Paypal holds the cart, do I understand this correctly?

    Now thats an entirely different ballgame. I never had a closer look at one of Paypals contracts for sellers, but speaking in GDPR terms that means joint controllership of Paypal and the seller to the entire (personal) data even before a customer actually clicks on checkout...

    Posted by Jonny Bradley posts: 126892 United Kingdom
    hman wrote:
    Your page looks very nice and polished, congratulations.


    Thanks 😁 it's geting there...

    hman wrote:
    [...] "where does the data go?", because every item you present on the grid has a basket icon that is an HTML FORM that communicates to Paypal, so Paypal holds the cart, do I understand this correctly?


    The forms on the page would go straight to PayPal if minicart.js wasn't there yes. PayPal handles the checkout so that's where the data ends up, however, in normal operation it's just at the end when you click "Checkout" (which actually i think should say "Continue to Payment" or something).

    PayPal has it's own terms and privacy policy which apply to the checkout process, the tiki site holds no personal information apart from the user's IP etc in the Apache logs, so i believe that is fine regarding GDPR complicance, but i'm not a lawyer. 🙄

    Thanks for the feedback!