TomatoCart

TomatoCart stable release has got published. Walk through the forum before that important moment …

“It becomes a torture to wait.”

“… Not even angry it's postponed. That just means there's less a chance for any bugs.”

Thank you for your understanding and your attention, TomatoCart community neighborhood. Your voices make TomatoCart different.

The team has also been looking forward to this release. We’ve been fighting for the thing that we love, with a strong conviction that you have to give up some interests in order to realize a little wish.

Tomorrow is another day, I hope and believe so.

TomatoCart V1.0 stable release adds a new feature list. It is very long, much longer than I and expected. Yeah we guys really did a good job, let me show off a bit please. Among the features the following are really my plate of dish:

1. Forgot Password for Administrators
2. SSL support for Frontend and Admin Panel
3. Admin directory customizable for better security
4. New configuration to control whether to allow customers to return products or not
5. Integrate Piwik web analytics report
6. New configuration to place websites offline for maintenance
7. Allow users to change the page size for grid view in the admin panel
8. Add translation in the Languages module

What’s your favorite?

Introduction

This is a tutorial on how to make a module for the web desktop admin panel of TomatoCart. There are two parts in this tutorial; the first part contains a short description of the admin panels architecture and the second part is a step-by-step walkthrough on creating products categories grid window in the admin panel.

TomatoCart is still in alpha release and its architecture will change in future, therefore this tutorial is only for TomatoCart Alpha release 1 and 2. It will be change later according to the change in the TomatoCart architecture.

TomatoCart Admin Panel's Architecture

TomatoCart is a fork project of osCommerce 3, therefore it derives most of the business logic and the architecture from osCommerce 3. The admin panel of osCommerce 3 is designed base on Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture; while the TomatoCart’s web desktop is based on RIA framework. Comparing to web-based MVC architecture, RIA architecture have several differences:

1. RIA’s user interface is created by Javascript not plain HTML page
2. The interactions between client and server is through Ajax instead of page submissions
3. In MVC the controller handles the input event from the user interface and forwards the page to different view according to the action process result; while in RIA the GUI code update the user interface according to the Ajax result.