Hi
I wanted to give the forum some feedback on my experiences with Alicommerce on DNN.
Before I do, I'll go back to DNN Openforce in Las Vegas 2007. The get together was great. I left the show with the feeling that this product was going places. I was particularly heartened by some of Shaun Walkers comments.
DNN is a great product, it goes from strength to strength and I truly believe that it is now a World Class product suitable for thousands of applications. The comments I liked from Shaun were about modules. Shaun and the mangaement have realised I think, that although DNN core is great, substandard modules are having a big negative effect on the reputation of DNN and if the problem of module quality is not addressed, a lot of people will be switched off of DNN because of poor experience with a cheap modules.
So, Shaun announced the DNN marketplace and with that a statement that all modules in the marketplace would be tested by DNN before they could be sold. A small cost was involved (I think he said $300 paid by the developer). He also intimated that if users bought modules from snowcovered that they should do it on a "buyer beware" basis as snowcovered has no QA in place. Great I thought, now I can buy all of my modules from DNN Marketplace and be certain that some kind of basic QA has been carried out on these modules and my only risk is whether I chose the right module or not.
E-commerce modules for DNN have been few and far between. There is a great module available called AspDotNetStoreFront, but priced at $1295 it is too expensive for basic shopping cart applications. I read somewhere that Ecommerce and DNN is a marriage made in Hell and from the lack of modules available and the quality of those available (excepting AspDotNetStrorefront) there may well be some truth in this.
When Alicommerce became available in the DNN Marketplace I decided to take a risk and buy a few copies to try on some projects that we have. On the face of it and if you play with the Alicommerce demo site the product looks simple. However, implementing the product with some basic necessities like shipping tables and credit card payment gateway integration is a different thing.
The product comes with no setup/user manual and no error reporting, so if you set something up incorrectly it just throws a DNN error and you have no idea what caused the glitch. Because of this you could spend hours/days, using trial and error to get a set of settings that actually work.
So Shaun, if you read this, how did this product get approval for the DNN Marketplace? Surely a basic user manual is a minimum requirement for any product. I also don't believe that this product was fully tested (as a full application on a webserver) by DNN so this puts a doubt in my mind about the whole DNN Marketplace approval system.
For now, I will treat the DNN Marketplace as no different to Snowcovered when it comes to module quality, and regard anything for sale there as unproven. Also, except for large applications where I will use AspDotNetStoreFront, I will abandon ideas of using integrated ecommerce modules with DNN. I will go back to established asp or php shopping cart modules that are documented, tried and tested and can be set up in minutes.
Chris