Light integration between elgg and (zencart, oscommerce, prestashop...)

Hi,

I'm new to Elgg and I've been thinking on setting up an elgg site with its own store. I've been testing the two plugins that I've found for this purpose, they are great, but aren't what I'm looking for.

I need a real ecommerce platform (bills, zones, taxes, etc) integrated into elgg. I've been thinking about how hard would be to create a plugin which integrates some existent platform (zencart, oscommerce, prestashop...) into elgg. The needed features would be:

- A widget with the product's thumb, name, price... The product can be a random product, a best-seller one...

- Automatic user creation in the store in the moment the user is created in elgg.

- Automatic login in the store when the user clicks the widget. Then, the user enters the shop (a shop entirely created in the selected platform, even in another domain), in the product's page.

The cart and the payment gateway would be the ones of the ecommerce platform.

You think it's really dificult? Is there something like that developed yet?

Thank you very much!

  • such an integration between elgg and zencart, oscommerce, prestashop,... wil take a fair amount of effort and a pretty good knowledge of the elgg api. there's too many functional requirements listed above for this to be easy ;-(

  • but it would be massive!!! especially cubecart...

  • Mmmmhhh imagine that the ecommerce is installed on a subfolder of elgg, isn't it possible to obtain these data directly from the ecommerce's database? wouldn't it be pretty easier?

    I think it would be a nice improvement for elgg :)

  • I mean we could try to resolve it at database level rather than at api level.

  • whichever way you do the integration - be prepared for a lot of heavy coding ! i do not see how any of this could be "...pretty easier" ;-P

  • Couldn't you place the ecommerse database fields within the elgg database and the only common fields would be the log on and profile? Or for that matter seporate databases joined to use the log on and profile? Once logged on you would have access to both. Link back to either using custom_index. Probably more to it than just that. Tools could have a link named shopping or whatever. When on the ecommerse side a link in the menu to get back to the elgg side.

  • LOLZ ;-) The integration of the login/authentication between Elgg and CubeCart, etc will take a decent++ PHP/Elgg/<Cart> developer some long time and many headaches.... Believe that this bottom-line from knowing the internals of both Elgg and Shopping Carts (e.g. CubeCart) ;-P There is no "easy way".. "obtain these data directly from the ecommerce's database..", "only common fields would be", etc - these statements do not make the integration coding any easier... e.g. If someone wants to try and develop only the single-sign-on for say Elgg and CubeCart.. go ahead and then.. you will see just the kind of effort that is involved. viz: try to locate the password wncryption routine for CubeCart - then we talk...;-X

  • @DhrupDeScoop

    I'm sure you really know better than us what we're talking about, but I'll try it. If I can't achieve this, at least I think I will learn a lot.

    I will tell you all in a week or so :)

  • Is there any way to integrate elgg with prestashop?

  • Fernandoch, it's possible to integrate prestashop with Elgg. This will be complex task though, just like Dhrup mentioned. In result, you will get a sloution which is much more limited and complex than Elgg-dedicated solution. Any modification to such solution will be very hard.

    We did research on integration of prestashop, Magento and a few other platforms with Elgg since we were implementing our own socialcommerce solution in last three months (it was completed last week). It requires at least 150 dev hours to create integration with external shop. According to our research, prestashop is best choice in most cases.

    We're still extending our solution. It's planned as a full-featured e-commerce platform, rather than simply a plugin for Elgg. Currently it already consists of 6 plugins. More details are available here. Your commments would be very usefull. You can have a real imact on development of our platform.

    We plan to release some of our solution's modules as GPL version once they're well tested.