The Past Few Weeks
It’s almost the middle of March, thus only two more weeks until I’ve missed my “first quarter 2009″ target. Don’t worry, I’ve not been idle…
The main areas of focus have been documentation, screenshots (not yet available), the privacy policy, and more content for my website. Turning bland features into attention-grabbing benefits has been ongoing for almost a month at this point, and I’m increasingly pleased with the results. (Read more about that here).
On the design front, I’ve enlisted the help of an artist to add more flare to my site. The hand-drawn icons she has created portray my sense of humor, and add something special to my otherwise lonely sea of text. See her work on the homepage. You can also see more of her work at daubery.com.
For about an hour or so I toyed around with freeprivacypolicy.com and a few others that come up in Google search results for “privacy policy generator” and “privacy policy template”, but they didn’t work out so well. Then I found mention of Automattic’s Privacy Policy on the Business of Software forums. Their policy is Creative Commons licensed, and they encourage you to tweak it to your needs, which didn’t take me too long. After some find-and-replace work and a once-over to remove all the verbiage pertaining to wordpress, round 1 of Privacy Policy creation was done. Round 2 will involve making sure what I’ve tweaked is compatible with California law, but that’s for another day.
Round 1 of PHPDocumentor docs is also complete, but the docs aren’t quite publishable yet. It was a big task, and involved writing scripts to automatically inject PHPDocumentor style comments at the top of class definitions, which helped jump-start the task in a big way. Additionally I began documentation focused on installation and customization, even though it is pretty fledgling at the moment. Either way, it gives a feel for how we compare to other commercial shopping carts.
On the menial task side, I imported United States postal code to city/state mappings, and Canadian provinces. Now I can display both countries in the country dropdowns. Selecting Canada brings up it’s own set of address fields (Province versus State) to show we’re not locked to the United States addressing system. To facilitate this, address field generation and validation is delegated to “country helpers”. These helpers know exactly which fields are required for postal addresses (and phone numbers) in their specific country, how to validate those fields, and how to present them. So if a storefront needs to work in a new country, the programmer should only have to create a new country helper.
Last week I make good progress on Paypal PayFlowPro, ViaKlix and Authorize.NET payment processor integration. But this week I decided to focus solely on Authorize.NET for the first release, since it was easy as pie to obtain a developer testing account from them. It’s time, once again, to start cutting features that aren’t essential for the first release.
Oh, I almost forgot. I spent about two hours skinning a demo store, but it’s not quite finished yet. Soon we’ll have a demo that actually looks like a real storefront.
That’s it for now. Licensing will be the next pile of legal shit I attempt to launch over, in additional to final preparations for release. But that’s misleading, there are many things left to do before release: publish rewrite rules, create a MySQL schema, fix some data on the order details page, prepare demo for storefront and admin. See, that’s not too much, right? I’m leaving off about 20 items that can wait until release 2.