What do YOU do while you’re waiting for your Ubuntu 8.10 Release Candidate ISO to download?

I played THIS GAME for quite a while.

(btw, my wife is WAY better at it than I am)

Why not try out the just-released OpenOffice.org Version 3.0?

• It’s a full-featured Office Suite that is fully compatible with documents created in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (including the newer .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx formats)
• It’s FREE!
• It works in Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX (Intel and PPC), and Linux
• It’s FREE!!
• It also supports version 1.2 of the ISO standard OpenDocument Format (ODF).  Microsoft Office does not.
• It’s FREE!!!
• and much, MUCH MORE!!!
• (it’s free)

Infomercial over.  At the time of this writing, their servers were so bogged down by people rushing to download it that they reduced their main page to plain text on a white background.  Anyone who remembers trying to download Firefox 3.0 on the day it was released will appreciate the ingenuity of this solution, as you can at least get to the download (even if it’s not pretty).  Also because of the heavy server load, download speeds are basically at a crawl (getting around 10 KB/s right now).

Speaking from personal experience, OpenOffice has actually helped me on several occasions as it strives to include features that are not available in Microsoft Office (for example, in the past it was things like being able to publish a document to PDF natively, though MS Office now includes this feature).  There were also some times where MS Office could not open one of its own documents (said there was corruption), but OpenOffice was able to open and save the document (saving the person I was helping HOURS of re-creating the document).

I have not been paid or in any way rewarded for telling you about this amazing product.

For the few of you following along at home, waiting to see what sort of eCommerce decisions we’re making with wiredchurches.com, we’re taking some steps towards using Ubercart.  There were a few driving forces behind this desicion.

• We are leaning towards open-source software in the first place for a couple reasons:
  1. Ease of customization/not locked into a product we can’t tweak
  2. Ability to hire a developer to create functionality we need (esp. a good event registration system)
  3. No yearly license fees

• Ubercart seems to have a majority of what we need built into the core package (others are missing vital pieces)
• I personally loved how they set up the Downloadable Products administration (some major products don’t even have an option for downloadable products yet.  See previous point, and earlier posts)
• Ryan Szrama (one of the developers of Ubercart) found an earlier post which sparked a dialogue that led to connecting with Mike O’Connor of the newly formed commerceguys.com
• In our first conference call, Mike pitched Ubercart well, plus he lives in Jackson, MI which would allow him to work with us in person whenever it would be beneficial

We met with Mike this past Friday.  Since he just lives a couple hours away, he drove down to spend 4 hours crammed into a small meeting room with all of us.  We threw a thousand questions at him, and I think he got a pretty good idea of how complex we want our system to be (he also answered the questions).

That’s it for now.  We’re waiting to hear if Mike is going to run screaming from this project now that he’s met us and knows more of what’s involved.

*edit* i’ve noticed a lot of traffic coming here from people searching for “ie tab Firefox 3″ and similar.  if you need the .xpi, just leave me a comment and I can email you the file.

From what I can gather, I was extremely lucky to get the IE Tab extension for FireFox 3 during a tiny window when the download was working.  Everyone I’ve heard from on the issue says the .xpi won’t install for them.  In any case, I’ve got the .xpi on my computer and my wife’s computer, and it’s working great on both, so if you are wanting it, just let me know.

In other news, we’re sort of settling in on an eCommerce solution for the new and hopefully improved wiredchurches.com.  More info on that coming very soon.

I know most people who glance at this blog don’t give two hoots about all this eCommerce stuff.  To those folks, I apologize for wasting your time.

However… I KNOW there are some people reading this who have experience doing this kind of thing, so to you folks I ask: Have any of you used shopify.com?  I stumbled accross it the other day, and so far I’m in like with it.  I didn’t find it earlier because it’s a different kind of solution than I had been searching for.  It’s fully hosted and charges monthly fees+transaction fees.  Nevertheless, I really like how easy and clear everything is.  I’m still looking under the hood to make sure it can do everything wiredchurches.com needs it to do.

One BIG thing it does that I L.O.V.E. is fetchapp.com, which is more or less a plugin for shopify (though it has an API to work with any site) that makes digital download products a breeze!  I’ve emailed briefly with one of the developers, and I’m excited about the potential here.

Well apparently there was/is a lot of confusion in the Magento community regarding “Virtual Products” vs. “Downloadable Products.”  While the roadmap and the buzz seemed to indicate that they were going to be basically the same, more research shows that the developers had to split “Downloadable Products” out of the 1.1 release as it was not yet ready.  “Virtual Products” are simply products that do not require shipping (perhaps an event registration).  The developers say that “Downloadable Products” are high on the list, and should be in the next release.  They may be too late.

I’ve been geekishly excited with anticipation for this day.  Magento 1.1.1 is finally available.  (this means digital downloads are now an option with Magento) I’ve narrowed the field of Open Source eCommerce solutions down to Magento and Ubercart (powered by Drupal).  Either of these look like they will suit our needs, and I’ve had some contact with an Ubercart developer who may be willing to jump on board and help us, but I’m still clinging to Magento’s VERY impressive admin panel.  Oh my.  Decisions, decisions.

I was googling and  looking through forums trying to find how to set a (null) field to be 0 in MySQL, and for some reason had a really hard time finding it (maybe it’s just too basic for most people).  In any case, i’m posting the (very simple) solution here in case I need to find it again quickly, and in case it can help someone else.

UPDATE `TableName` SET `FieldName` = 0 WHERE `FieldName` IS NULL;

That’s all folks!

Well, I tried using Microsoft Popfly on a tip, and it looks pretty cool, but I was not able to save any of my projects (getting error codes).  Anyone else used it with success?  It looks like a lot of fun, but it’s only fun if it works!

After much searching, tinkering, installing, re-installing, re-re-installing, etc., I’ve sort of narrowed down some options that look like really good possibilities for open-source, fully featured eCommerce solutions.

Magento: Very obviously an extremely professional product.  Though relatively new, it’s got TONS of support and buzz.  Right now I see two drawbacks: it looks like it’ll take a good bit of tweaking and designing to make it look REALLY good (it looks “just good,” though professional, out of the box), and it does not yet support “virtual products” (aka digital downloads).  For the first, we’ve got a crack team of website gurus here at GCC, and if they ever feel over their heads, we can hire some outside help to get it up and running.  For the second, the Magento team promises that virtual products will be an option in the next release, slated for sometime this July (and the alpha I tried out does indeed have it as an option, just not a working option yet)

PrestaShop: Looks very, VERY nice out of the box, was EXTREMELY easy to use/customize.  Probably wouldn’t need any outside help to make it look how we want, with plenty of flash (the aesthetic, not necessarily the technology).  Downsides: it’s currently in Release Candidate 4 for the stable 1.0 version.  Hopefully that means full stable coming very soon.  Downloadable product size limited to 7MB, so we’d be restricted to users downloading PDFs with links/passwords to actual product.  Also, on my first run (today), the whole backend/admin panel suddenly stopped working.  Not sure what’s going on.  Time for one of those re-installs.
*update* before even posting this, I checked again, and was able to get to it.  I blame our lack of good connection here at work, as it had been timing out

Drupal with Ubercart: Actually has pretty much everything we need.  TONS of free modules, ability to have calendar with workshops scheduled, final releases of the software, all the options we are looking for.  Drawback: it just doesn’t seem as professional as the other two.  Oddly enough, it seems like a CMS that has an eCommerce layer on top of it (hmm, wonder why that is).  Things are relatively clearly laid out…. it just doesn’t FEEL as nice as the others (we’re talking admin panel here).  The store itself should be pretty easy to make it look nice.

SO HERE’S MY QUESTION: Has anyone used any of these, and can provide feedback/advice on the good, bad, and ugly of using them in production?  These seem to be three of the top dogs in the open-source eCommerce community, but are there others that are so amazing that I simply must check them out?  Let me know!