Necessary features

[leoalv]

Hello, I am amazed with this eCommerce extension. Congratulations great work.
But I am sorry that it is not so popular at JED. I took the liberty of making purchases with other extensions of this type; The results are amazing for Phoca Cart, but from my point of view they have weaknesses that I have discovered until today and they are: Payment plugins and the cancellation of global configurations from the menu configuration.

Payment plugins: I have many years in electronic commerce and what my clients have asked me the most has always been a payment plugin for their country or the most popular gateways worldwide or in their region. To meet this need, can you or your team develop plugins on demand? or create plugins and put them up for sale? This would put Phoca cart in the place it deserves.

Menu Settigns: Online businesses almost never have a single configuration, they always look for different ways to present their products, such as number of columns, hiding some features.

New features:

Show Subcategory products: Currently it only shows the products of the category and from the main configuration you can only assign the number of subcategories to show but you cannot show the products of the subcategories, it would be good to add that option to show the products of the subcategories along with those of the parent product.

Product Bundle: Downloadable products is a great feature of Phoca Cart, but the vast majority of digital products are sold in packets or monthly subscriptions, it would be nice to add at least one of those features. If it is a subscription it would be with access to a selected category or categories.

I am sorry to be so extensive but I wanted to discuss these necessary characteristics in one place. I am willing to further expand the ideas if necessary.

Thank you.

[Jan]

Hi,

Payment plugins - as you can see in other posts, I am ready to partitipate on developing different payment plugins and I give my full support to payment plugin developers if needed (coordination, help support, possible changes in core, promotion, ...). Unfortunately for me, it is not possible to e.g. implement some specific national payment method of country which language I don't speak, which characters I don't know

Show products from category and subcategory - not sure if I understand correctly - when you should display products from category and subcategory together, what is the reason to have the subcategory, why not to add all the products to one category?

BTW this is possible in items view where you can filter and display more categories at once, so you can display products from more categories - even from parent and subcategory. see e.g. example:

https://www.phoca.cz/jtd/?c=2-clean-sim ... -corporate

Product from two categories are displayed on the same page.

There are two large feature request tasks which are planned in near feature:

- advanced order edit
- subscriptions

So, yes, it is planned to extend the functionality by the subscription feature.

Anyway thank you very much for your ideas. This feedback is welcomed.

Jan

[leoalv]

Thanks for the answer, now I have more clarity about the future of this extension.
I think the issue of payment plugins is clear.

Show products from subcategories: Considering the filters and that I have discovered that I can add a product to multiple categories, I think this issue is covered. In an extreme case it is possible to create an override from the template.

Change Global Settings from the menu: What do you think of this feature? Options such as changing column numbers, showing hide subcategories, and other basic options.

Extending the idea of subscriptions and sale of digital products: In a site that sells digital products there are always forums, restricted documentation and other content that is implemented with other components of Joomla. So I would like the feature of selecting a Joomla user group which will be assigned to the customer who buys the product or the subscription and which will be removed when the subscription expires. With this feature you can even sell access to Joomla articles.

Thank you for taking my ideas into consideration, I am free to expand my ideas.
Amazed by your work in Phoca Cart!

[Jan]

Change Global Settings from the menu

This is one of the greatest feature with only one problem - almost no one understands it and almost everyone is confused, this option was included in Phoca Gallery and I didn't do anything in the forum but I explained why it works that way:

https://www.phoca.cz/documents/16-jooml ... -in-joomla
https://www.phoca.cz/documents/16-jooml ... a-25-17-16
https://www.phoca.cz/documents/16-jooml ... -in-joomla

... the next problem is when you use eshop extension, you should not use more than one menu link to categories/category/product view. If you will do, this mostly ends with a lot of duplicate links, etc. So if you use only one menu link, one global configuration is enough.

But even there is no paremeter in menu link, it is very easy to add it to menu XML file and extend the parameters you need in menu link. So mostly only some are needed, so just copy and paste the needed and it should work. The problem is, for each user another parameter is important, so adding all generally to menu link is not good way. As you can see, there are so much parameters so adding them to menu link (so system will check them with global configuration and make the override) is something that burdens performance and slows down loading of page.

So as written, this is great feature but has some limits (understanding, performance, etc...) so for now really hard to say which paremter and why it should be a part of menu link

Subscription - Ok, thank you for the ideas.

Jan

[leoalv]

Hello Jan, any news about these features? In which version or in what time frame do you plan to incorporate these features.

- advanced order edit
- subscriptions

Many thanks.

[Jan]

The TODO ordering was changed:

- first: subscriptions
- then advanced order edit.

I am working slowly on subscriptions now, but really slowly as the priority now is to overwrite code so it will work in J4 (which e.g. means that if there are 92 views in administration and each view for example gets new feature like filtering, then overwriting it to J4 take some weeks/months for one feature).

So unfortunately I cannot say when it will be ready. Mostly this is done step by step and e.g. some feature is implemented step by step in 4 versions until it will be ready in fifth version.

Unfortunately time needs to be splitted between new features and making extensions ready for J!4. So no time frame or version number. I just started but really no idea when it will be finished.

Jan

[leoalv]

Hello, thanks for starting to work on these features, no matter if it is slow, it is understood that compatibility with Jooma 4 is essential and delays other projects.

Thanks again.

[Jan]

I hope the basic structure (simple subscriptions) will be ready soon. Then it will be needed to properly test it and then add step by stpe some additional features including support for payment methods (recurring) could be implemented.

[leoalv]

Ok, I'll be ready to try it out, and think of some additional necessary features.

Thanks.

[leoalv]

Hello, Jan.
These features are already part of the new stable version 4.0.0?