Post by jiao » Sat Oct 12, 2013 11:57 am

It baffles me that I need to use mickey mouse modules to hack my cart into working correctly in 2013. Here is a short list of very basic features that are missing that making building a store 100 times more tedious than it needs to be.

1- Bulk product import/export. Free module is crap and broke my store.
2- Quick editing of products from product view list in admin. Like price, name, sku, enable/disable. How many clicks does it take to get to the center of a…
3- Save and keep editing. Thanks for making me navigate back every time I save, yay!
4- Click product link in admin to see product in front end. More wasted clicks.
5- Better image manager that does not require 500 steps to upload photos. How about browse, select-all, insert! Is that too difficult?

Clearly the developers of opencart don’t actually run websites, at least not any with any more than 20 products, because they would quickly find out that compared with other carts, actually building your store with opencart is a royal pain in the ass!

This idea that we can just add modules for basic features is no good. People can half-ass the modules, modules can conflict with other modules, we don’t even know what is in the modules or if they are hacking our stores or whatever.
Think I am about to throw in the towel and go hosted.

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Post by Cue4cheap » Sat Oct 12, 2013 1:47 pm

I don't know about all that but I had a 1.5.6 version of opencart up and running in 4 hours. 1400+ products and 5000+ options and multiple images.
I did get an odd error that caused me to redo it again slowly and document everything I did but once I added and tested and proved it must have been some sort of corruption with my original install I redid it once more from scratch in about 3 1/2 hour with 30+ vqmods (3 of which I wrote).
Better cart then a lot of pay for ones for certain!

In fact I believe if you got #1 working 2 - 5 would be resolved as well.
My $0.02

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Post by jiao » Sat Oct 12, 2013 2:17 pm

Well sure, if you can write mods then obviously you will have very few issues.

For the rest of us......

And that's my whole point. Basic functions require mods. These should be part of any modern shopping cart system.

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Post by labeshops » Sat Oct 12, 2013 8:52 pm

What you consider "basic necessities" others never use. I for one, never import products. Never saw the logic of creating a csv file and typing everything out there just to pull it into the store when I can just add it to the store thru the admin panel. And yes, I have a lot of products (6000 in to date and about another 30k to go). And the very, very few of my 80+ suppliers that have product files I could import, I wouldn't want to - I prefer to write my own, unique descriptions than use the same old ones (sometimes wrong or incomplete ones) they provide that joe smo uses on ebay.

I never look at the product on the front end after I put it in thru admin - didn't even notice the storefront button until recently even. I know what it will look like after putting in my first product and checking it.

For everything else, there are super easy to install and often free modules. Or you can learn to do little things yourself (I have tweaked my image uploader so it displays the most recently uploaded images first instead of having to scroll for them for example - directions I found in the forums). Or just wait til the next release of opencart when some of those things might be added (I think the save/keep editing is in new versions???)

No program will be 100% perfect for everyone - which is why extensions and tweaks exist to begin with.

Running Opencart v3.0.3.2 with multi-stores and the default template from https://www.labeshops.com which has links to all my stores.


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Post by Cue4cheap » Sat Oct 12, 2013 10:21 pm

jiao wrote:Well sure, if you can write mods then obviously you will have very few issues.

For the rest of us......

And that's my whole point. Basic functions require mods. These should be part of any modern shopping cart system.
Jiao,

Trust me when I say I feel your pain. In fact I am not live yet for my new store since I am waiting to confirm one payment module and get this holiday weekend over BUT the current cart I am using it took me months to get online because of all the bugs and flaws it has because it had so many "useful features". All tangled and half working together.

JNeuhoff's export / import tool, while it uses a lot of resources, once set up right with your site, works pretty darn well. The only other downside is it doesn't do incremental uploads.

The other extensions were all free and the three I wrote were simple monkey-can-do-it ones like turn off a module when the weight in the cart gets over a certain weight.

This place is active and has some helpful and knowledgeable people and a lot of things that people have already figured out to make your store work like you want it to. Post up a problem or two in their own threads and lets see what can be done to get your list of issues fixed...... Like what is the issue you are having with JNeuhoff's import / export tool??

Mike

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Post by sputnik-1 » Fri Oct 25, 2013 5:12 am

3- Save and keep editing. Thanks for making me navigate back every time I save, yay!
We do really need that I found when adding long descriptions and specifications to products!
4- Click product link in admin to see product in front end. More wasted clicks.
The answer to that is to use separate browser tabs. One for the store front view of the product's page you are editing.
Another tab with the OC admin page backend on Catalog->Products->Edit.

Save your edits and switch to the store front tab and reload the product page. Or duel monitors with the product's store page opened on one monitor, and the OC admin backend on the other monitor. I don't have a problem using multiple tabs to switch from OC admin backend to store front to view edits to products.
(I have tweaked my image uploader so it displays the most recently uploaded images first instead of having to scroll for them for example - directions I found in the forums).
Something else we need - a search function on the image uploader so one can start to type the filename of a recently uploaded image and go straight to it, rather than having to scroll and search manually for it.

HTH :)

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