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
