E-commerce and Plone as web services
Plone conference 2010
Plone CMS or framework
Plone is a CMS not a framework and trying to shoehorn products as add ons is not always the best option. E-commerce are big and complex systems and not simple plugins.
Today we have EasyShop GetPaid and PCommerce which are installable into Plone. None of them is perfect and almost all of them are abandoned or have very little development. When they are installed they are hard to remove because your Plone CMS has become a product inventory, a order management and customer management system. Keeping this out of Plone will make your Plone experience much better.
Service Oriented Architecture
SOA has been around for a while and we use web services like Google Maps everyday. When you create or need new functions for your website think API - web service. This way you can use the best tool for the job or an existing tool like e-commerce system.
Benefits beside the best tool for the job is that your Plone site is easier to upgrade because the CMS is not polluted with a complex system. You also have the flexibility to exchange services when needed or choose to host some of them in the cloud.
E-commerce and theme as a service
When we looked for the e-commerce system we had the requirements that it should be python, it should have a good open source license and be actively developed. We could only find two python e-commerce systems, Lightning Fast Shop - LFS and Satchmo both based on Django. In our case study, Lavendeldockor we choose LFS because it was clean, small and fast. We also implemented the theme with XDV so we could reuse it for both Plone and LFS.
Plone conference 2010 presentation and further information
For more information you can watch the Plone conference presentation about External E-commerce and Plone play along or contact Sasha Vinčić at +46708 840 660 or online form.