Are there any good commercial e-commerce site templates (or site definitions?) for sharepoint?
I noticed a lot of strong opinions (good and bad) about sharepoint on this site, is this a good direction to take?
Having been involved a few projects involving public facing sites built on SharePoint, I'd highly advise against building something as customization-heavy as an e-commerce site on it.
You'll end up spending more time on attempting to force the platform onto the requirements than actually doing any meaningful development.
In addition, the platform itself has a relatively sheltered development community consisting of mainly 3rd party vendors who tend to charge an arm and a leg for half baked solutions, so you won't be able to tap into much outside of that. (aside from the previously mentioned painful development process)
Related
I'm looking for advice from expert developers here on launching a service MVP. I'm currently in the process of finding an outsourced development team on Upwork and Fiverr, but there are differing opinions on the development approach, so it's hard to make a decision.
We're planning to launch an activity gift marketplace similar to https://www.tinggly.com/. It's a bit different from a typical multi-vendor marketplace, as the gift giver purchases a package that includes various activities, and the recipient selects one of the included activities.
There's a split in opinion among vendors between customizing a Shopify multi-vendor marketplace app and building everything from scratch. If you were in my position, which approach do you think would be best?
It doesn't need to be perfect because it's our MVP, but it's difficult to decide which approach would suit us the best. We aim to launch our MVP within 2-3 weeks, and the budget is 3.5k.
We've also included a link to our Figma page, in case that's helpful!
https://www.figma.com/file/mPWLU5enyyL14dMUDU6Ad9/Gifty-MVP?node-id=0%3A1&t=19xcdiN2h71YPqje-1
We were thinking of using multi-vendor marketplace app on Shopify. But because our marketplace only sell bundle packages, and the final product is not decided until the recipient chooses it, we would need a workaround if we insist on using shopify.
I was wondering if there is a website that helps with giving you a checklist for your web app, to make sure you don't miss anything!! It could be very tedious when building a large project by yourself! obviously nothing specific, just a guideline for a web app. thanks
This doesn't necessarily work for all projects, but it's a great start!
http://launchlist.net/
In light of your comment below, I recommend
http://goplanapp.net
it's free and open-source and allows you to create project milestones, have ongoing discussions on various issues, and alot more.
Trac is a website driven software that allows you to set milestones, reports, svn browsing, priorities, bug tracking, and wiki's. A lot of active open source projects use it to host their software. I use it extensively for each client project I start.
I like http://kanbanery.com/ alot.
It allows you to have tasks with subtasks, add info, attachments, comments, etc to a task and you can arrange those in multiple columns.
(I know it is targeted at scrum / kanban teams, but the app can be tailored to make it fit for your workflow)
I have a development team specialized in ASP.NET. So the solutions we provide are web based, running on IIS and using MS SQL server. Everything within the intranet of the company. The team has this expertise, and they are excellent in C#, and .Net in general.
The company is deploying SharePoint MOSS 2007. This deployment is part of a project that I am not involved in, and for which I have very little information. However I know that they have established the "thinkers" layer (those who will say what to do), the integrations layer (the who will configure, deploy and manage the production), and that they need to establish the so called development layer (those who will do things the other two can't).
I am asked to evaluate the possibility to increase my team's expertise by adding SharePoint development. This is the easy part, I just have to find the required training and send my people.
However these days the word development could mean a lot of things and sometimes I discover that configuration is used in place of development.
I don't have any objections to evolve the team by developing new expertise, but I want to be sure to keep things stimulating for my developers.
Secondly I don't want to say that we have SharePoint development expertise, and actually what we do is just modifying css or xml files. Also, I don't think that using wizards to produce a solution is the best path to push a C# developer to follow.
The questions I am asking myself first is : what is the background of a SharePoint developer? how could .Net developers feel if asked to become SharePoint developers?
Any thoughts will be greatly appreciated.
I started in Sharepoint development over a year ago when I inherited a WSS 3.0 solution at my company.
Personally I think it was a great step for me getting to know Sharepoint development a little, there are a lot of problems (e.g. security, load – balance, ghosting) that was good to see how was solved by the WSS team and helps me solve problems in other solutions I‘m working on. But I don‘t work on WSS solutions full time, so others have to anwer how it is working with WSS every day.
WSS and Sharepoint are an extension on the ASP.NET platform, so any experience in ASP.NET and .NET in general should be a good foundation for a developer that is starting creating Sharepoint solutions. I read the Inside Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 book in order to get the basic concepts and wss solution architecuture before I started working on WSS projects.
I quickly found out that you have to have a Virtual Machine environment for Sharepoint development, this is because it‘s a pain working on a client and attaching to a remote process on the server to get in debug mode. Therefore I recommend creating a MOSS virtual machine that has Visual Studio installed that has access to your source control system. Develop solutions on that machine and when finished then check into source control.
I also recommend looking at development tools, such as stsdev and wspbuilder to help you building your solution, these will ease you development process quite a bit. There are also quite a lot of tools available on the web, e.g. codeplex to help you out.
Sometimes it can be a pain developing these solutions, changes can require recycling the IIS pool or a brute-force IISReset, error messages can sometimes by a little cryptic and so on. But you quickly catch on and know where to look. Sharepoint also helps you out a lot, I‘ve had millions of questions from clients that can be solved with standard out-of the box web parts, so that I don‘t have to code anhything to keep my clients happy :)
Sharepoint also expects solutions to be coded in certain way, e.g. 12 hive filestructure so it helps you standardizing your solutions.
There is a serious lack of documentation, so that you have to rely on Reflector and such tools a lot, just to know what is happening within the framework, hopefully this gets better with 2010.
The initial learning curve is high, and a lot of new concepts an technologies to learn ,e.g. Workflows within sharepoint, featuers, ghosting and code access security
There is a lot of Xml configuration that sharepoint uses that developers have to learn, this includes the site definition, list templates and more. There are sometimes days when I‘m stuck in Xml edit mode and can‘t figure out why things don‘t work as they should do
These are just few of my thought, I‘ve been working mainly in WSS development and it would be great if someone could comment regarding web part configuration in Sharepoint, e.g. configuring the search. Which is something I haven‘t been doing a lot of.
From what I have heard around, the SharePoint is a popular technology from the customer point of view, but an object of hatred among developers.
Nice to see you noted Dev and Admin being used "incorrectly".
Although Developing for SharePoint could be purely that, development, like creating webparts etc., I strongly encourage you and your team to get to grips with SharePoint deployment, installation and configuration as well. I am fully SharePoint Certified (WSS Config/Dev and MOSS Config/Dev) and having knowledge of both ends has been invaluable for me.
Knowing what is configured where will help in debugging and troubleshooting along the way. I suggest taking an MCTS WSS 3.0 COnfiguration training / and or a MOSS Config training for at least 1 or 2 of your team. The rest of the team will pick up the essentials as they go along, having those 2 certified colleagues as go to guys concerning config and admin.
IMHO, being a sharepoint consultant entails knowing how to create a piece of functionality as a dev and then being able to deploy, configure and maintain that piece of functionality as an admin (or at least an informed end/power user).
Albert, take a look at this other thread titled Is a sharepoint developer technically “equipped” to do custom app dev and vise-versa. There's quite a bit of info in there about what's involved in making the leap from pure .NET to SharePoint.
My co-worker is studying SharePoint at the moment. Making fun of him all the time. Frequently he gabbles something like "wtf is that??!!". And then i feel a bit sad, because i know - there's a probability that i'll have to learn that stuff too (i guess it's not so easy to get projects nowadays).
I see it more as configuration and customization than software development (something like hunting down fing checkbox for 3 days in a row). You pick up some clay through those crazy sharepoint designers and then endlessly customize it.
For everything i know already - there's a new name (i.e. - spGridView) and unexpected behavior underneath.
Html that gets rendered is bizzare (tables and bunch of serialized viewstate everywhere).
But those configuration xml`s... o_0
Now that's a hurdle i can't get over. Even hardcore SQL stuff starts to seem like a childish game.
Maybe i'm wrong, but as i have heard - Microsoft developed 'spatial columns' (let's you expand count of columns for tables over thousandsomething) for sql mainly because of Sharepoint. That terrifies me.
Of course - my opinion is HIGHLY subjective and a bit offensive. But i hope that helps to better reveal what i think & feel about Sharepoint.
Hopefully developers you are working with sees this different.
In short:
No. I wouldn't like to become a sharepoint developer.
Edit:
I could handle that initial complexity. But the main reason i don't want to - i don't think that development in Sharepoint is the right way to go. I mean - lately people discuss that webforms provides too much abstraction. Then what to say about Sharepoint?
To be a successful SharePoint developer you must have a high threshold for pain and the patience of a Buddha.
thank you all for the answers, they are all really helpful.
from what I read here, I see two things to consider.
First is the context of utilization which I think is an important factor. In some places SharePoint "development" could go very far, and could involve developing really exciting things, in order to satisfy new customers' needs. it could involve writing code and so on. And in some other places it could be just administration and configuration, in order to maintain already established solutions.
Secondly is the personal motivation. It really depends on the person. Some .Net developers with good experience, will prefer not to go in a direction, where they will not code the "SharePoint way", and will like to write code in C# or some other languages. However there will be others that will choose this path and will be happy to have such careers. They will be motivated and thus propose really nice solutions.
For example, from my personal perspective and if I had stayed in development and programming, I would not choose SharePoint development using high level wizards and menus,as a progress path for my career. Even though I am not doing it these days, I still enjoy coding, compiling, debugging etc, but this is just me.
A client wants us to develop a Picture Library system for them. The requirements are pretty typical - need to add pictures, tag them with metadata, store different sized versions and so on.
The client is keen on it being developed as a component which plugs into their existing SharePoint system. However, my feeling is that we would be better served building a standalone app - that way we don't have to shoehorn it into a SharePoint page and muck about integrating with SharePoint's APIs.
I am trying to look at this objectively and would welcome any arguments either way that people have.
Using an existing framework like Sharepoint imposes a lot of constraints on the design which makes the software architecture more uniform.
It does require some work on the part of the developer, because the developer does have to understand the API architecture and API's, etc.
However, developing a standalone application is the way that business's software architecture becomes a mix of 200 applications, using 20 different languages/architectures/platforms, half of which were developed by people no longer there - in short, a mess.
Sharepoint is documented, and will be supported probably long after you leave the company. Can you guarantee support for the application that you develop for as long as Microsoft will support Sharepoint?
You should do a cost/benefit analysis of integrating with SharePoint. You have listed some cons for integrating with SharePoint. Here are some pros.
Widely adopted platform.
Existing functionality to store/retreive/update images to data store.
Existing functionality to tag images.
Existing functionality to group several images together and treat as one virtual document (if using SharePoint 2010).
Keep in mind that you can integrate any custom ASP.NET page/application in Sharepoint so you can approach development like a standalone app. Your client wishes might include synchronization with Sharepoint's own picture library functionality and in that case you'll have to work with it's API.
It seems with SharePoint you are already done because it can more or less do what you describe already. What requirements do you have that cannot be met by OOB SharePoint?
I've used picture libraries for something similar before. While they have their quirks you do get a lot 'for free' like a UI, bulk uploading, metadata and 2 alternate sizes rendered.. My biggest gripe is they don't support the datagrid view so I cannot edit list metadata en masse like you can with other list types.
I am a junior developer and I have just graduated from university this year. I am working private with some people and I have just been given a music website to develop using DotNetNuke. I have a some experience using DotNetNuke which I have gained making small modules that take care of certain functionality on a webpages but I have never taken on a whole website before. I would love it if some one would give me some guidence on how to approach this project and answer some of my questions.
What are the steps involved in developing a dotnetnuke website?
How different is it from a developers perspective to develop a dotnetnuke cms website from a cms website which was developed from scratch?
When it comes to the database do you add tables to the database incrementally as you develop new functionality or do you plan everything in advance and create tables and stored procedures at once?
What are the steps involved in developing a dotnetnuke website?
Pick your version (if you're starting now, pick 5.1.1)
Installation (use Source package locally, Install package everywhere else)
Settings Configuration (performance, security, user info, etc.)
Adding & configuring core/third party modules
Adding & configuring third party skins
Custom Extension (typically module or provider) Development
Custom Skin Development
How different is it from a developers
perspective to develop a dotnetnuke
cms website from a cms website which
was developed from scratch?
Very. When you're starting with an established CMS you're inheriting solutions to tons and tons of solved problems. In the case of DNN, you have a substantial framework at your disposal. The focus will be more on learning and leveraging the existing API/features. If you're starting from scratch you're providing that foundation yourself. Using an established CMS is not necessarily better than the other - it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If you require fine-grained control over everything and you want a great learning experience, rolling your own may be the best way to go.
When it comes to the database do you
add tables to the database
incrementally as you develop new
functionality or do you plan
everything in advance and create
tables and stored procedures at once?
No matter what your project is, I'd suggest doing things as they are needed and not before. I think "doing everything in advance" would be impossible/horrible anyway. The heart of this question is really going to be defining your development process - I don't think this would necessarily be any different than in other projects. I like to define the features I want, organize them based on their relation to each other (which should come first due to dependencies, etc) and start implementing them one at a time and give each one the attention it needs.
You may also want to look into Lee Sykes' tutorials on module development using OpenWebStudio. However, I'm more on the design end, mainly just skinning, configuring, SE optimizing sites and matching client needs to our library of licensed 3rd party modules. However, the DNN community is VERY supportive and VERY helpful. There are some great resources out there, and I've found several blogs by the core development team to be essential for helping me wrap my head around the DNN framework.
Keep with it, and don't be scared to ask questions.
References:
www.dnncreative.com - Lee Sykes' Site, many tutorials on the how-tos of the DNN system. It's well worth the yearly subscription IMHO.
www.dotnetnuke.com - The main site for the DNN community
www.snowcovered.com - Central (AFAIK) site where many module developers sell their products, everything from skins to modules.