Twisted Tree Designs

Website Name:	Twisted Tree Designs
Url:	http://twistedtreedesigns.com/
Owner:	Krysty Simons
Description:	This is an e-commerce site that allows Krysty Simons to sell her handmade jewelry, specifically, her Tree Of Life pendants.
CMS Used:	osCommerce
Implementing & Maintaining the Application:	This was my first implemention of an open source e-commerce CMS. I chose it because of its popularity, its wide support base, its simplistic design, and the fact that it had more options for addons and modules than any other open source e-commerce CMS. After setting it up for Krysty, I taught her how to use the administration section and other than that, I had to do little else to keep the website going. Krysty still calls me from time to time in order to get the url of the administration section. I host all my sites through a single hosting account from eboundhost.com and they prodide me with anything I ever need and phenomenal service in all sense of the word.
Integrating a Web Design into the CMS:	Working a web design into osCommerce was quite simple. All their code is simple, self explanatory, and easily modifiable. Krysty had already created the main logo and already had some sort of site design in mind. I created additional graphics and design elements according to her specifications and integrated them with the osCommerce CMS. I truncated a lot of the CMS code and changed certain CSS elements and classes of the CMS, specifically the colors. I also modified some of the osCommerce core images to match Krysty's design and color schemes.
Additional Functionality (Plugins, Patches, and Modules):	The osCommerce core has limited preferences for shipping. Krysty requested some additional functionality in that arena, and so I went to the osCommerce website to see if their was a solution. To my surprise, there was not just one, but several patches that provided the correct way of processing shipping for Krysty's needs. I downloaded it and installed it with no problems; it was a quick fix. Krysty also requested a mailing list form separate from the the e-commerce portion of the website, so, I created a form, a mailing list file, and PHP code which processed the form and appended it to the file. I then linked the mailing list form to the homepage. I also created a custom online contact submission form for her.

Overall, developing this site was a very pleasurable experience. It utilized my skills as a programmer and gave me new insight into the structure of an open source e-commerce system. Krysty continues to use the site to sell her jewelry after two years. Since ZenCart (the current most popluar open source e-commerce CMS) is based on the osCommerce core, knowledge of osCommerce gave me the ability to easily modify a site that uses ZenCart to sell merchandise from Nepal.

The Hemp Tree Collection

Website Name:	The Hemp Tree Collection
Url:	http://alternatown.com/
Owner:	Kevin Vernoy
Description:	This is an eccommerce site to show and sell my art.
CMS Used:	Prestashop
Implementing & Maintaining the Application:	This was my third implementation of an open source e-commerce CMS. The entire application is quite large, containing litterally thousands of files, and it took a long time to upload. After an attempt to install the CMS, what I had read about it requiring PHP5 was confirmed, and I had to wait until the systems administrator from eboundhost.com to migrate my account to one that has PHP5.2 installed. I chose Prestashop for several reasons. It originally seemed like an up and coming e-commerce package that showed promise and potential. I liked the look and feel of Prestashop better than that of osCommerce and ZenCart. It came with stylish effects and built-in support for google checkout. It is very user friendly and aethetically pleasing. At first I thought that the administration section of the CMS would be ideal for users (people like Krysty), however, found its organization to be quite confusing and misleading in certain ways.
Integrating a Web Design into the CMS:	My first encounter with updating certain elements of the website, such as the main logo and the CSS, seemed easier than other open source e-commerce CMSs that I have used. Modifying the modules in the administration section made it very simple to add or subtract certain parts of the website. However, I soon found the internal code of the website to be extremely difficult to read. I like to understand the code that I am using and I was disappointed to find that the code was incredibly obfuscated. Many of the paths to included php files were hard to follow. They used a combination of PHP files, XML, tpl (template) files, and MySQL files to store variables. So instead of looking in one or two places to find I was looking for, I often had to search several different places. Other than that, it was quite simple. I modified the color of the images and some of the CSS to fit my website's look and feel.
Additional Functionality (Plugins, Patches, and Modules):	I found it extremely easy to add, remove and edit componants of the website using the pre-packaged modules; amongst the modules were everything I needed. For example, all I had to do in order to install Google Checkout was push the 'install' button for the Google Checkout module in the module section of the administration area. Prestashop was designed so that you wouldn't have to modify the internal code in any way in order to get the website to do what you want it to do, and they did a very good job at doing just that.

I haven't sold anything through the site yet, but its very nice to have something that people can go to in order to look at my trees and see how much I am charging. One of the best things about Prestashop is that it allows multiple pictures for each product, something which I thought was vital for my means; it has worked out very well for me in this manner. I don't think I will use Prestashop again for any future projects because of the amount of time that must be spent in order to customize the theme/color/appearance of the website. One way to scale this would be to remove the background from whole picture by limiting the default images to trasparent images and adding a colorization module which could change the hue and saturation (a simple function to write with php-based image manipulation). I would recommend Prestashop to non-programmer designers who can understand the concept of modules and how to configure them.

SuperFLAC

Website Name:	SuperFLAC
Url:	http://superflac.com/
Owner:	Kevin Vernoy
Description:	This website, that I am in the process of developing, allows musicians and users to upload, download, and sell lossless audio online.
CMS Used:	OtherCreature
Implementing & Maintaining the Application:	OtherCreature is a content management system that I developed, myself, from scratch. It allows people to create their own simple porfolio/website on the fly. It allows for many things: (1)the creation of personal nested/recursive categories/webpages, (2)the uploading of pictures, (3)the uploading of audio, (4)the uploading of video, (5)multiple text entries, (6)multiple links, (7)a profile picture, (8)a gallery/slide show of uploaded pictures, (9)the modification of a background image, the link color, the text color, and the background color, and (10) the creation of multi-functional objects. The CMS then automatically arranges and displays only the things that have been uploaded in a way specified by the user. SuperFLAC is an implementation of OtherCreature. One of the fundamental changes made in this implementation is how SuperFLAC processes files. They are now uploaded to the sever via perl, first, before any POST information is stored. This allows for the large uploads to be dealt with properly.
Integrating a Web Design into the CMS:	OtherCreature CMS was originally designed to be completely scalable, portable, and versitile, so creating a web design around it was a snap, especially since I wrote the code myself. One of the main improvements over the OtherCreature CMS is that the SuperFLAC website allows for an upload progress bar to be displayed while uploading any number of files. Since lossless audio files can be quite large, I thought it imperative to include information about the status of the files as they were being uploaded. The only readily available option allowing this sort of interaction was perl. I didn't want to resort to flash or other extraneous methods and I knew that I could depend on perl's direct interface with the system. This required a slight redesign of the CMS itself in the way it processes a form's files. This redesign, however, resulted in a more streamlined, efficient, and scalable CMS than the original.
Additional Functionality (Plugins, Patches, and Modules):	Since some musician might want to upload their entire album at once, I implemented a way to add as many upload fields as desired. When multiple files are being uploaded, the upload bar would then show the progress of the combined upload. If a user times out, the upload will continue until the it is complete, but, any information will not be processed until the user provides their login information. I have not implemented an e-commerce portion to SuperFLAC.com as of yet; I am not yet at that point. I have not finalized the best route and method. My option are many. I might use code portions from another e-commerce CMS, but I would want to make sure that the code is friendly with zero loopholes.

I am very excited about this project as I have been considering developing something like it for quite some time. But, being who I am, I want it to be as friendly and as open as possible which is something that takes a lot of time to do. I look forward to its launch and its future developments and I look forward to getting feedback from the first peoples who start using it.