The astounding Neon Night-Rider and the return of the web

Recently I’ve been working with Substruct, an acceptable-at-best shopping cart app in Rails. It’s the first Poplabs Rails project, and for the most part straightforward, but it’s times like these I wish we were given the option of using Shopify.

I’ve been racking my brain out for the past week, and even at a time when I’m trying not to think about what’s going on back in Houston, I can’t seem to understand why Substruct was smart enough to allow for product variation, but not attributes. What do I mean? Well, you can accommodate for a product with different sizes pretty easily, but the way variations are handled (basically as a separate product) is a pretty poor way to do it. What if I just had different color shirts? Well, some of the helpful comments on the Substruct forums include “make several different variations for colors.” Yeah, thanks. It’s totally unnecessary. Sadly, Zen Cart proves better in this scenario.

All I’m looking to do is to have several different attributes selectable, and that would require some heavy code changes that only I currently can do. I’ll be trying to work on this through the rest of the night until I get it.

Then in between that there’s AIR San Antonio (and now since I’m already here that defeats the point of having a ticket), other Rails apps, and I’m trying to go back to PHP development (yes, I said PHP) and Java. E-commerce really needs to be easier on a framework that is supposed to be a quick and effective way to develop web apps.

I’ve been doing nothing but e-commerce projects for the past month. I can’t wait to do something else.

Tags: air san antonio, e-commerce, hurricane ike, php, rails, substruct

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.