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Framework on Framework and Managing Joomla Versions

July 28, 2012

Something that’s been on my mind for a while is how to manage Joomla versions.

Imagine, if  you would, Club Commerce at full membership, whose Members contributed a quarter million dollars in direct software development, and confronting the release of Joomla 3.0.

What if Joomla 3.0 makes much of that quarter-mill investment in Joomla 2.5 development obsolete? Or partially obsolete?

How do we manage these Joomla versions to protect our investment?

This question came to mind reading the Nicholas’ reply to a “Future of FoF” ticket (this quote is an excertp):

Right now the biggest challenge is Joomla!’s MVC future. Since Joomla! 3.0 the JModel / JController / JView names are used by Interfaces and the new MVC structure which has nothing to do with the old one and pretty much screws all fools who did things the Joomla! Way. The old structure is retained in the Legacy classes, e.g. JModelLegacy. Despite no plan actually existing, I suspect that the Legacy classes will be dropped. When that happens I will include them inside FOF. If the other Joomla! Platform classes FOF depends on are re-fuck-tored too, I will provide my own alternatives. In other words I am going to grow FOF as the Joomla! features it depends on are spirited away between Joomla! releases. This will asymptotically lead to a new framework but, as I said, backwards compatibility is king. The only real reason for me to break it is a new PHP version making it impossible to keep it.

FoF (FOF?!) reduces code required to write components; and, helps today’s components work in tomorrow’s Joomla. Very interesting, and a welcome solution to an emerging pressure.

We’ll have to talk about this within my Club, as it grows.

 


Toronto Joomla User Group Meet-up, July 2012

July 25, 2012

Toronto SkylineOn a rainy mid-summer’s evening, just two JUGT regulars shlepped out to the Firkin at Yonge @ Sheppard on Wednesday July 25th.

Yup, just me and Douglas.

You’d think that it was a lousy turnout, but our Joomla meet-up was a raging success! Why? Because, the fact that we got to know each other at these JUGT’s led to a request to help with a project.

So we spent our time well, discussing Joomla with a certain intensity over pub fare, talking about a real project. No hypothetical scenarios, no discussions about state of the JED (confession: it was a nice break!). We talked about how the Framework on Framework (aka “FoF”) really does save time writing components, using reference tables, using repositories and Phing, test-driven development, and a bunch of other things specific to the project.

Attending Joomla meet-ups is as much about getting to know fellow Joomla pros as it is learning about Joomla. For me, getting to know the JUGT regulars over the years has proved a massive plus for my Joomla freelance consulting business. How satisfying it is to help a newer regular in a similar fashion that I myself was welcomed when I was a “newer regular”.

Bring your problems to the August 22nd JUGT meet-up in Yorkville. Hope that just a few of us make it down, so you have us all to yourself!

 

 


Tienda Alpha for Joomla 2.5: LaSalleMart is Going Its Own Way

July 19, 2012

LaSalleMart is Going Its Own Way

Zach asked me about Tienda Alpha for Joomla 2.5. Now, Derek asked me today in an email. Well, let’s get it out there, shall we.

Tienda Alpha for Joomla 2.5 was recently released. Are we going to use it to create LaSalleMart for Joomla 2.5?

No.

LaSalleMart is a fork of Tienda 0.8.2, which is a Joomla 1.5 cart.

LaSalleMart for Joomla 2.5 is not a fork of Tienda for Joomla 2.5.

We’ve not been waiting around for Tienda for Joomla 2.5 to roll around so we can fork it.  It’s already been forked!

You can go your own way!
Go your own way
You can call it another lonely day
Another lonely day
You can go your own way!
Go your own way
You can call it another lonely day

There are a bunch of reasons why we are going our own way with LaSalleMart for Joomla 2.5 right off the bat.

It took a shitload of work doing the initial fork (FYI: more precisely, we forked my custom Tienda Distro), getting Live Update going, splitting Tienda into multiple GitHub repos, and figuring out Phing to create three simultaneous flavours. Then, Zach and I worked our tushes off collaborating for the first live site’s UAT.

Zach and I had met personally during the UAT to discuss the live site; and, to talk about converting to Joomla 2.5. We agreed that we would strip out a ton of stuff, convert a “lean mean” LaSalleMart, and then we would build up feature upon feature via Club Commerce. After all, the Club is supposed to be a feature creation machine!

So, once that live site was humming, I checked on the status of the Tienda for Joomla 2.5 project, as the time to convert LaSalleMart to Joomla 2.5 had come. The status: it was a work in progress. So,  no code to study. No problemo.

So, the intention was to get the massive single extension reduced to a merely huge single extension, convert it to Joomla 2.5, and then, essentially, start the “real” LaSalleMart development. Our goal is simply to get a LaSalleMart for Joomla 2.5 to get the ball rolling.

So, finally, I sat down to start the conversion. It took 20 minutes to realize what a crock of shit our approach was. I asked Zach, how the hell are we supposed to know if our conversion efforts are working? Are we supposed to magically do the conversion, then install it on Joomla 2.5, and voila! Then start the debug?

Our UAT work had me returning to the Tienda download page to confirm something I remember reading. Yup, there was a caveat on that download page, warning that Tienda was a “production beta” and, there are things that may not work.

So, y’know, we were making an assumption without realizing it. We were assuming that Tienda was “convertible” as-is. If something doesn’t work, then will that introduce problems while converting? Which is faster: making Tienda production-ready first in Joomla 1.5, and then converting; or, converting and hoping there are no real obstacles to conversion? Only hindsight has the answers.

There’s a technical term I learned in my computer science courses: “Fuck It!”. That was my solution. We would go our own way right away. The point of having an intermediate step was to make things easier, so we could get our foothold in 2.5. Well, there’s no easy intermediate step, there’s just a bunch of hard decisions to make.

Zach was exactly right to kick my ass to convert my custom Tienda Distro into LaSalleMart. Exactly right that I should stop marketing Club Commerce and put sweat equity into LaSalleMart. BTW, he did so in person, in a consummate professional manner — something that motivates me to reach out to my fellow GTA-ers to form the bulk of my Club Commerce Members. However, all that time I spent enumerating how Club Commerce will work, and how there’s supra-RoI inherent in the development process, has its effect: I have a razor sharp vision of LaSalleMart.

In the end, we are creating LaSalleMart anyways. We are not setting out to create an idyllic version of Tienda; nor, is our objective to create a Joomla 2.5 version of Tienda. Tienda is our starting point, and a great starting point. But, LaSalleMart will eventually lose all its Tienda-ness anyways. If this starts sooner than later, then it starts sooner than later.

We’re going to bust up LaSalleMart into a ton of repos — so, let’s start that now. We’re going to strip away all the Tienda Framework anyways, so let’s start that now. We’re going to remove all the cross-selling extensions, so let’s clean it up now.

We’re going our own way because we know the way we’re going.

So, I sat down and did something amazing. I took what I think is the simplest piece of the admin and started from scratch. And, it worked! Oh boy, did it work.

You know what I did? I took Nicholas’ sample component for his Framework on Framework (aka “FoF”), and created a different General Configuration form. In a fell swoop, I completely sidestepped conversion, and I completely sidestepped all the clean-up. Hopefully, this approach will work through the admin, because, gee, after all, the admin is one big “front end” for the database. I have my doubts, but I’ll cross the bridges as I get to them. The General Config involves some clean-up, but that’s another blog post.

I ended up adding to the “FoF”. I’ve not made a pull request yet, but I will. To be honest, I’m wondering if I should fork “FoF”, start a new LaSalleMart library, or what. Although I have an idea what to do, I’ll be putting these ideas to Zach next week when we meet for the Toronto Joomla meet-up. Although I’ve bugged him already.

We certainly have enough material to cover already for our first Club Commerce meet-up, when local Membership grows!

Something to remember, of course, is that Tienda released an alpha. Meaning it’s released for testing. My only interest is to study the code. And my interest doing that right now is reflected in my not having downloaded it, and have no plans to do so.

 You can go your own way!
Go your own way
You can call it another lonely day


Anahita 2.0 Birth Release – Why Anahita Matters to us

July 19, 2012

Anahita Social Engine

Anahita 2.0 is out.

Read about it at the Anahitapolis blog, “So what is new in Anahita 2.0“.

My Club Members-only site, at http://www.southlasallecommerce.com/members, is an Anahita site.

I’ll tell you something: my upgrade failed! I got a “fatal error”, and then a white screen. Yes, I took extra backups before my upgrade, on top of the usual daily backups. So, I logged into Anahitapolis.com and posted my problem.

Anahitapolis.com is not your usual forum support site. The entire philosophy is different. Here’s one of the podcasts we’ve done about it.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it really happened… I had three sites to upgrade last night. Kids sleeping, decide I can’t put it off any longer, I upgrade my two WordPress sites & my Anahita site. I do the backups, and the WordPress sites upgrade fine. Not just WordPress itself, but Genesis Framework upgrade, the usual batch of plugins, and of course have to reset WordBooker plugin. Whew, all went fine. Then, Anahita upgrade. Fail fail fail. Fatal Error. Copy error message. 500 error too! I download the upgrade package and manually upload all the files (theory: will correct copy error). Fail fail fail!

I’m human. I got upset. As in, really upset. So I took a breath, and reminded myself that when I post in Anahitapolis, Ash or Rastin will personally read and reply to it. You think I’m joking, but I am not. My behavioiur in Anahitapolis.com is much much different than in regular forums (which I haven’t bothered with in a while, now that I think of it), because it’s a social Hackerpreneur Club website, not a support forum. Professionals participate in the site, and the developers themselves are uber-active in it. So, it’s far far better to take a deep breath and provide an intelligent post so they can help me as best they can. Put another way, my confidence is so high that I will receive the help I need, that I did what I could to help them help me. So after calming down from my frustration hissy-fit, I posted stats on my environment and error messages and crossed my fingers that it would be an easy diagnoses.

This is what I want in my own Members-only Club Site.

The diagnoses is not easy: migrating from version 1.6 to 2.0 is not cut-and-dried. Ok… I am contemplating doing a fresh install, since I can get away with it this one last time. This would be my third from-scratch install of Anahita. Version 1.5, version 1.6, and version 2.0. From here, there will need to be a migration… and I’m sure to post about this after all is said and done on Anahitapolis.com.

Have you heard my “Learning from Ash and Rastin” podcast? You can read ‘em as well as listen…

UPDATE: Rastin tweeted that he warned me about using an “embryo” release. Anahita 1.6 was an “embryo” release, indeed. Well, v2.0 is intended for production sites, so, fresh install this weekend-ish…


In Plain English, Here’s the Gist of LaSalleMart and Club Commerce

July 18, 2012

Today in the Toronto Joomla Group’s Facebook page, I was asked to use “Plain English” with my explanations.

Fair enough!

Here’s the gist:

—-

GIST OF THE GIST:

Club Commerce is a co-operative of consultants who are vertically integrating into software development.

Club Commerce is NOT, repeat NOT, a typical Joomla club that sells software via site subscriptions. 

It’s pretty effin’ expensive doing software development. Not to mention not every consultant can do some sort of coding. Plus, there’s a massive amount of software development to do. So, to achieve vertical integration, we band together! It’s that simple.

Vertical integration means we create/maintain the software we use for our consulting business.

Vertical integration does NOT, repeat NOT, mean selling our software!

We are vertically integrating into software development because it is good business. Our revenues depend on technology, and we don’t want to rely on others for that technology with which our revenues depend. 

The $36/month to me is to offset the loss of consulting revenue by leading LaSalleMart/Club Commerce. Otherwise, pursuing LaSalleMart will be a side hobby. Or, I end up developing LaSalleMart for a small coterie of monied clients and the general public will not see the LaSalleMart at all — which is Very Bad. 

Bad because there are amazing business opportunities for us consultants (and site owners) who “do the code”. 

The $83.33/month extra per Club Member pays for programmers we hire. Members pay this directly to the programmers, not me. $83.33/month x 12 months x 300 Members = $250,000 in direct programming.

—-

Did anyone play the trumpet like Satchmo before Satchmo?

Well, we’re playing Joomla ecommerce, but in a completely different way than anyone has done it before.

Club Commerce/LaSalleMart is new, is different, and is the right fucking response to our unique fucking pressures as consultants in the worse private sector economy since the Dirty Thirties.

And, as Zach says, “Why is it a pain to find a Canadian eCommerce solution for Joomla?” — because there isn’t one! Until now!

—–

There are the live versions of LaSalleMart:

  • LaSalleMart 1.0 for  Canada for Joomla 1.5 only;
  • LaSalleMart 1.0 for California for Joomla 1.5 only;
  • LaSalleMart 1.0 “Regular” for Joomla 1.5 only.

LaSalleMart is available by subscribing to my Club Commerce. The cost is $36CDN per month.

To the best of our knowledge, LaSalleMart Canada is the only full featured Joomla cart maintained by and for Canadians.

To the best of our knowledge, LaSalleMart is the only full featured Joomla cart maintained in North America — which seems rather incredible. Yet, the Joomla carts are mainly European.

—–

LaSalleMart 1.0 is a fork of Tienda 0.8.2.

More precisely, LaSalleMart 1.0 is a fork of Bob Bloom’s custom Distro for Tienda 0.8.2, which included an add-on for Canadian GST/PST/HST. This Distro was live on a handful of sites before the full fledged fork.

The main differences are:

  • Akeeba Live Update;
  • cleaned up back-to-basics checkout;
  • guest checkout and one page checkout deleted;
  • custom extension footer;
  • registration form layout tweaks;
  • some Tienda rough edges smoothed out during UAT for first live site.

We put in practice the theory we’ve been espousing about software builds with tremendous success. There are three simultaneous full featured flavours of LaSalleMart; and, we can get fixes and upgrades onto your site within 10 minutes.

—–

We are currently working on LaSalleMart for Joomla 2.5 by converting Tienda 0.8.2 to Joomla 2.5.

We assumed that we’d do a straight conversion first. Once we had LaSalleMart for Joomla 2.5 in our hands, then we’d start modifying it drastically.

What is actually happening is that we are diving into changes whilst converting. I will skip completely the why’s and wherefore’s.

—–

We are not extension developers, we are consultants.

We decided to vertically integrate into software development because it makes business sense for us. So, we are coming at extension development from the other side, the user side, which is highly unusual! We are blessed with some programming chops, but this is the first time we actually forked a Joomla extension.

Once we got into software development, we discovered that there are profound business opportunities from being involved in development. If we had not “crossed the line”, we’d never open our eyes to it.

These profound business opportunities are based on two things:

  • free uber-geeky software process tools;
  • we  have the code, and the software development process, and the websites – a powerful edge.

—–

Who are we?

We are a very small group of consultants and users who comprise the Founding Members of Club Commerce. There are less than a dozen of us. Most of us live in the GTA, and are active in the JUGT, with a wonderful representative from JUGSWO. All are Canadians, except for an exceptional consultant living in Los Angeles.

Of our tiny group of fabulous professionals, Zach Atkinson and myself are the ones doing the actual development right now. It’s been a tremendous advantage that we are able to physically meet-up, and it is this powerful collaboration that is motiving me to urge our fellow GTA-ers to be half of the 300 Club Commerce Members — we have a heckuva opportunity here to kick major Joomla ecomm ass.

—–

The purpose of Club Commerce is to band together our peers so we can harvest these business opportunities.

Cost sharing is an key component of banding together.

Here’s an example. Canada Post just announced improvements to its web services. These require fresh coding. Peers banding together to share the costs ensures that these new features are brought to our websites fast.

Here’s another example: integrating QuickBooks with LaSalleMart. I guess-timate that the inital cost will be $15,000, and yearly maintenance $5,000. QuickBooks Canada is not the same thing as QuickBooks U.S.  So, 100 of us Canadians in Club Commerce band together with $150 each to build this integration.

Will you be able to serve your local Canadian market better because you have up-to-date Canada Post features? Because you have QuickBooks integration? We know we will!

—–

Relying on ourselves, and not relying on others, will put more features in our hands with which to grow our consulting and online businesses. Our clients will make more money, and we will have more billing opportunities.

—–

Additionally, because Club Commerce Founding Members are mostly people associated with the Joomla User Group Toronto and Joomla User Group SouthWest Ontario, we want at least half our Club Commerce Members to be from the extended GTA area (including Niagara). Why? So we can meet in person to maximize our learning opportunities, talk about LaSalleMart’s development one-on-one; and, to give back to JUGT and JUGSWO which have been very good for LaSalleMart. Toronto can be on the forefront of worldwide Joomla ecommerce — why not!

-Bob

 


Free LaSalleMart Version and JED Listing

July 17, 2012

Today on the Joomla User Group Toronto Facebook page, I was asked:

… can I get a look at LaSalleMart possibly give it a trial?

My eyes read “can I get a look at LaSallemart possibly give it a trial?”. My ears heard “can I get a FREE look at LaSalleMart possibly give it a FREE trial?”. My head interpreted it as “Can I get LaSalleMart for free?”.

Here’s the bottom line on a freebie version of LaSalleMart: once LaSalleMart for Joomla 2.5 is done, and once we figured out how we will intermediate Joomla (another blog post, but not today!),  we will release a basic Joomla Distro of LaSalleMart called “LaSalleMart Lite”.

It will have the basic feature set.

It’s raison d’etre will be to let the public kick the LaSalleMart tires. A segment of the marketplace will be satisfied with the feature set offered, and we’re happy to satisfy that marketplace.

Now, a couple of things. First, we’re going to have to release simultaneous versions of “LaSalleMart Lite” — for Canada, for the rest of the world , for California (perhaps); and, for whatever jurisdiction there is a demand.

Secondly, there is little chance that an all encompassing all-in-one installation routine will be created for LaSalleMart. Why? Because the Joomla installer represents a technical and psychological bottleneck, that’s why! LaSalleMart will be comprised of a lot of disparate pieces, and the intention is to create a matrix of custom Joomla Distros to put those pieces together. The “LaSalleMart Lite” series of Distros will be a subset of the entire matrix of Joomla Distros we will create/maintain within Club Commerce.

Once the “LaSalleMart Lite” Distros are locked-and-loaded, we will solicit the JED to list LaSalleMart.

We could do some work with the LaSalleMart 1.0 for Joomla 1.5 that we have, but to drive on the highway to Joomla 2.5 we need to resist the sideroads.

So, in the here-and-now, there is no free version of LaSalleMart for download, nor a JED listing. In due time!

UPDATE: I much prefer that LaSalleMart/Club Commerce stand on its own two feet, and not depend on other sites for referrals. In particular, but not excluding, the JED. You never know when your referrals go poof.

 

 


Mid July LaSalleMart Status

July 15, 2012

UpdateAnother month already!

 

Through a referral, talked to a potential client about the ecomm site they want to build. For the first time ev-ah since freelancing, I felt powerful. Like the gutteral revs of a motorcycle engine type of powerful.

Whatever the feature list, I knew it could be done. In-house. No more wondering if someone else’s cart I specialize in would have a promised feature released on time. No more trying to build a missing core feature without touching the core source files.

That’s the power of Club membership. Individually, you can’t be in the technology. But, together, by banding together, we are in the technology business. That makes us very powerful.

 

This month I migrated a Tienda Canada Distro to LaSalleMart Canada. It is in a dev site, it’s not gone live. It was a PITA, as migration is a purely manual affair. Yuck. Zach and I will now test/improve PayPal Pro.

If we can defer doing Canada Post, we will. I am conflicted, to be honest, about all LaSalleMart for Joomla 1.5 work because the need to convert to Joomla 2.5 is hu-mon-gous. Shouldn’t we put every effort into the conversion? If we can manage to defer Canada Post, then great. If not, maybe we should pass the hat and hire a dev to do it. Something that will be worth talking about with Club Commerce Members.

My Membership Drive, so to speak, started yesterday. The thought of doing is thrilled me so much that I did more programming after publishing my final marketing blog post. I’m at 0 new Members out of 300. Today I will post in a few sites, and start contacting people individually.

If I didn’t absolutely completely fully understand the magnitude of the benefits derived from Club Commerce, I’d drop it in a nanosecond.

Changing tact here to my Members-only Anahita site… I know that this site’s template is messed up a bit. However, it’s a dev version of Anahita Social Engine version 2.0. The final version is very nearly done — in fact there’s a new pre-final version to install that I’ve not installed yet — and it’s worth it to leave alone and wait for the final version. The deeper reason is that Ash and Rastin are using Bootstrap for the first time, and with each iteration they get better with Bootstrap & integrating it into Anahita. So, we’ll bear with them all the way, and then we’ll be using a live site with Bootstrap that we can reference for LaSalleMart.

Ok, let’s talk about com_lmadminconfig.  Would prefer to call it “com_lasallemart_administration_general_configuration”, but the shorter the better.

Instead of figuring out how to convert Tienda’s admin component to Joomla 2.5, I am busting it up into a bunch of smaller components, and basically starting from scratch where possible. Starting with the “easiest” chunk of the admin, the “General Configuration”. The admin itself is purely a means to update the database. So, using Akeeba’s “Framework on Framework” should be a Big Help in writing “BREAD” functions (browse, read, edit, add, delete records).

My assumption about who is using LaSalleMart is different than the  usual. I assume it’s not a consumer. Who is using LaSalleMart? People who are integrating into software development. It’s very important to do things in a standard way, because we-the-members-of-Club-Commerce want to get software onto our sites as fast as possible. So, displaying all the config options in a single form is not a priority. Let’s stick to what FoF was made for, and not just bull ahead with a custom form. Config records change infrequently, and the intention is to initialize them as much as possible during installation, so editing one single record at a time is not unreasonable.

Another things is that we have to be careful not to stuff all sorts of shit into our existing components. What I am finding is that there are so many exceptions with the configuration that the exceptions are the standard.

One thing that is irritating is that the configuration codes are not used in the language strings. It sure would be easier if the same code were used throughout the component, so it would be easy to recognize what goes with which. Not to mention, makes it easier to program! Why hard-code the name of the language string when we can use a variable?

So, bet your ass there’s refactoring going on.

One thing that I am  doing is adding reference tables in the database. I want a standard way of using codes, which is have a small static table listing the codes. This is done with currencies already: #__lasallemart_currencies is a teeny tiny table whose records are currency codes. I don’t want to hard code codes, and I don’t want to use the “enum” field type in the tables. I want to use standard reference tables, and then use FoF so I have to do a one line call to build the drop-down field. Based on fine work already done, I wrote this ability into FoF.

If we at Club Commerce really want to create decent software fast, then we better give a shit about how we construct our software. The “I’m a user so I don’t care how you do it” attitude doesn’t cut it here, because this is completely anti-thetical to what we are setting out to achieve. We can’t vertically integrate into software development and simultaneously not give a shit about developing software.

It’s not about the features! The power is in the ability to create features AND bring those features to real sites. Learning and using FoF — and getting involved in that project — now instead of later –refactoring the non-standard stuff. Well, here we go!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Framework on Framework: Adding Drop-Down Form Fields

July 12, 2012
Helping FoF

Is that a Helper File in your FoF, or are you just happy to see me?

The sample Framework on Framework (aka FoF) “To-Do” component uses a helper file (administrator/components/ com_todo/helper/select.php) within the component to create drop-down form fields. Such as, a drop down “yes/no” form field.

Knowing that I will have a lot of small-ish components comprising the new LaSalleMart for Joomla 2.5 admin, it’s preferable to have this helper file in FoF itself.

So, what I did was move the select.php file to /libraries/fof/, and rename it “select.utils.php”. The new filename reflects the fiilename convention of helper-type files already in FoF.

I changed the class to:

class FOFSelectUtils extends JAdministratorHelper

As well, I added a $separator parameter to several methods, and shoehorned in IF statements, so I can omit the separator option. I do not want “–select–/yes/no”.

Furthermore, I added a new method called “referencetable”, to display the records of a static reference table. For example, there’s a table listing available currencies. Which currency do you want as your Default Currency? This new method creates the drop-down form field “US Dollar/Euro/Japanese Yen/Canadian Dollar” based on the #__lasallemart_currencies table.

I still have that ../helper/select.php file in my component. But, now, it’s strictly for stuff unique to my component. Since the basic form field code is gone, it’s a lot smaller now.

On deck is the multiple selection drop-down form field. Then, I’ll fork FoF, add my handiwork, and do a pull (merge) request. By early next week. Surely, in time for the next Toronto JUG meet-up so I can blab about my exploits.

The truth is, as amazed that my file worked the first time I tried it (!), my new helper file is very mundane and based on fine work already done.

As requested, comments are enabled.

 

 

 

 

 

 


My Fellow Canucksters: Time to Sign-up for Club Commerce Membership

July 10, 2012

Here we are. Finally. Time to sign-up Club Commerce Members.

300 Club Commerce Members. That’s it.

Right now, beyond my handful of fabulous Founding Members, there are no further Club Commerce Members.

That means I am asking you to be first to sign up.

It sure would be easier if I had 270 Members paying the $36CDN/month, and contributing a further $83.33CDN (or possibly USD)/month to hired programmers, and then asking you to be one of my last 30 Members, before I close the door to Membership altogether.

To my fellow Canadians, and particularly those in the extended GTA (Davis Drive to Lake Ontario, Whitby to Guelph/Waterloo, and Niagara area), you  have a vested interested joining.

A critical mass of Members from the JUGT and JUGSWO  areas justifies personal meet-up, classroom style sessions, and JUGT/JUGSWO joint event planning.

No Joomla cart is made in Canada. Until now. LaSalleMart is the first, and only, full featured Joomla cart made in Canada by Canadians, and frankly, for Canadians. To honour Club Commerce’s first meet-up, we may meet at a Timmies to really savour the milestone. Maybe we should call LaSalleMart Canada for Joomla 2.5 “double double”.

We have something very special here. Which is why I am asking you to be un-Canadian in your pursuit of it: be the first to sign up.

This is where the main Joomla cart extensions are located:

  • JoomShopping: Germany;
  • HikaShop: France;
  • RedShop: Denmark;
  • SimpleCaddy: Texas! As it’s listing in JED says, “without the need of setting up a complete shop”;
  • JoomAce: Turkey;
  • VirtueMart: Germany;
  • Tienda: New York.

BTW, I have no intention of listing LaSalleMart on the JED. But that’s another story…

Interestingly, only one full featured cart is made in the USA. Did I miss one? And it is this cart that LaSalleMart is forking.

Here is your opportunity to take care of home.

I know that I am frustrated that there’s a lack of home-grown Canadian Joomla ecommerce; and, that I am proud to lead the way. But, alas, I am not the only one.

Zach Atkinson is working very hard on LaSalleMart with me. He asks right off the bat, “Why is it such a pain to find a Canadian solution for Joomla online shopping?“. Forget that it’s a pain, it’s impossible. There isn’t one. Again, did I miss something? Did I miss something beyond someone in Quebec ripping off my free HST/PST/GST add-on for Virtuemart 1.1.x?

My Club Commerce is meant for people like you: site owners and consultants to site owners. Club Commerce lets us vertically integrate into code development, which opens up vast business opportunities.

Club Commerce is a made-in-Canada innovation, based on the “Hackerpreneur” ideas and site of the Anahita Social Network — two more fellow Canadians in Vancouver!

I’m a third generation Torontonian (don’t hold that against me!). Half my Club Commerce Founding Members belong to Joomla User Group Toronto. I was first to bring HST/PST/GST to Virtuemart, and I was first to bring it to Tienda — and of course it’s now built into LaSalleMart Canada. And this is just the start of the Canadianization we can bring to our full featured Joomla cart.

Contact Zach. Contact Joe “Joomla” Sonne. Heck, come on down to the July JUGT meet-up later this month (ah, Zach has already registered). We’re real, baby.

Time is now for me to push for Membership sign-ups — especially right here in my Home and Native Land.

The time is now for you to join my Club Commerce at http://www.southlasallecommerce.com/index.php?option=com_akeebasubs&view=level&Itemid=231

Looking forward to meeting you on the inside,

-Bob

 

 

 

 

 

 


Testimonials: It’s Happening – LaSalleMart is Making Headway

July 9, 2012

A place where LaSalleMart interest is nascently percolating is the Joomla User Group Toronto’s Facebook page.

Which makes sense since most Club Commerce Founding Members are JUGT regulars. It’s a great connection to the Joomla project. Through Club Commerce, I want to give back to JUGT — and JUGSWO — and by extension (wow, am I funny today!) to the Joomla project.

Geez, it’s through JUGT that I was introduced to Tienda. JUGT hosted a Tienda seminar. I am grateful for the wonderful connections and look forward to Club Commerce being an active JUGT and JUGSWO sponsor.

Ah, here is the Facebook link. There’s two FB JUGT pages — Alan explained it to me but I forget why. Zach’s June 25th post — read the comments.

It’s happening!


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