Symphony.

I'm trying to decide whether or not to go with Symphony for a shop site (alternatives being OpenCart, LemonStand or even Magento), and am hoping to get some clarification on how a Symphony integration with FoxyCart might work as I'm very much a beginner Symphony user and not a programmer.

I've outlined how I think it might work, and I'm after any thoughts, identification of potential sticking points and advice please. :-)

Also, if you're a Symphony developer who would like to work on this, please let me know - I need to price this job as soon as possible. In fact, it's quite urgent (new browseable catalogue to be online asap; shop functioning by 1 October if possible) so if someone wanted to take the technical stuff on, leaving me to do most of the XSLT+HTML+CSS, that would likely suit me fine.

Fistly, I'll quote myself from another thread:

I'm looking at options for a browse-able online product catalogue (approx. 1000 products) that also needs to sell to trade customers only; so although anyone can browse the product range with retail prices, trade customers need to have an approved account before they can view trade prices and submit an order.

I created the current site a few years ago in custom PHP/MySQL - was a great learning experience but it's not very maintainable or fresh. Now the client has selling to trade in mind, and I'd like to get it into Symphony if possible.

I'm thinking the browsing and trade customer features as mentioned above would be relatively easy now that the Members extension is released (even though I'm still a Symphony noob and haven't used Members yet - might need to hire a Symphony developer to do some parts), and that the cart/checkout part can be handled by FoxyCart, as TheJester12 previously suggested. FoxyCart doesn't need to know about products; instead, the product information is sent to it when a customer adds a product to their basket via get/post. (The obvious gaping security concern is apparently sorted by something they've come up with called HMAC.)

The FoxyCart approach seems like it should work well with Symphony CMS sites. Any thoughts on this in general or the trade members requirements?

I'm now fairly certain there's nothing holding me back from POSTing products from a Symphony site to FoxyCart, although I plan to test this sometime this week.

The site will only allow pre-approved, logged in members to purchase, so I'm thinking the Symphony Members module should provide for this. To integrate with FoxyCart, I'm thinking that the FoxyCart API can be used to create these customers once (and only once) they're approved by the Symphony Admin user, and that Single Sign-On can be used to avoid getting customers to login twice.

However, FoxyCart doesn't provide for customers to view previous orders. To facilitate this I'd need to have completed orders sent back to the Symphony site as XML and store them in a Section. I don't know the storing in Symphony would be done.

The product/category data that already exists in my old PHP/MySQL site would need to be brought into Symphony. You can see a representation of the schema here. This is also something I would rather a developer did, as even if I could manage it I think it would take me ages.

So any guidance or offers of taking on the more techy side of the project welcome. Thanks!

Personally I'd go with 100% symphony, no foxycart. I'd use simplecart for a dynamic cart, but on checkout only rely on it for the items, not the prices.(It's 2 steps, but has the advantage you could serve your catalogues static, and only the checkout dynamic, as opposed to ajaxing an entire dynamic site) Have a look at this 100% symphony shop like that

I've used Foxycart before, but never really "integrated" it. I imagine there's a way to do it, with its XML api.. But that's way beyond my capabilities. I basically just created a "Products" section, then set them up as the links and/or forms to pass it all to Foxycart.. Worked like a charm, and it was surprisingly simple.. But it's not the ideal integrated checkout / cart system one would desire having.

@DavidOliver, I think the biggest potential pain point (or at least the biggest need for extra database work) would be providing customers the ability to view previous orders, but I'd do that with the FoxyCart API rather than storing it locally. You certainly could store it locally, but with the API it'd be easy to just request it from FoxyCart, get the data and output it to whatever HTML you'd like.

I think your approach sounds solid though. So long as you can sync users and do up an SSO endpoint, it should be pretty seamless. We'd be happy to help with any best-practices on our end if you'd like.

Thanks for the comments!

@newnomad
I had a look at Lovesoul, and I like the instantness of the shopping cart. However, for this project I'm still thinking I'd prefer to outsource the cart part and avoid building what isn't required.

@XBleed
Good to know the products and cart part has been done before. :-)

@foxycart_brett
Thanks for taking a look and posting here. So what would the procedure be like for adding a new customer? A new trade customer registers at the Symphony site, and the site owner approves them (which results in a new customer being created at FoxyCart via the API). Then the trade customer can login at the Symphony site and view trade prices as well as adding products to the cart and checking out at FoxyCart. Orders are regularly pulled from FoxyCart to the Symphony site via the API so that logged-in customers can see previous orders. ?

I'll have to look into how the API would be used from within a Symphony site - new territory for me...

and avoid building what isn't required.

You do know that a few symphonians are already building a CRM ensemble? Coupled with the member extension it could easily provide customers the ability to view previous orders. Its probably more straightforward then working with a 3th party API.

Maybe you should call out to the community to divide tasks and together build this CRM/eshop in 100% symphony?

Maybe you should call out to the community to divide tasks and together build this CRM/eshop in 100% symphony?

That would, of course, be great. :-) I did read about the CRM. How many are working on that? Just Lewis at the moment or more? I'm open to working together on it if people feel that's possible (my contributions would likely be limited mainly to HTML+CSS), but it would need to be done to a schedule for the client.

Payment gateway integration would need to be sorted as well in this case - not sure how time intensive that would be. I think the client will be looking to use something like SagePay rather than PayPal.

Since I don't need it at the moment, I forgot about payment gateways, that is indeed the tricky part, and I can see why you would consider foxycart to smoothen that. It is always assumed that different gateways are required by different symphony projects across the world. However it is my understanding that adyen could be of use as a universal gateway for all symphonians. Easy integration (or hosted payment), backend, localisation, all payment methods, constant innovation, and best transparent rates...

Orders are regularly pulled from FoxyCart to the Symphony site via the API so that logged-in customers can see previous orders. ?

I'd just query the API as needed. No need to store it locally. I really don't think it'd be too big a deal though. The FoxyCart API returns pretty straightforward XML, which is easy to parse and turn into HTML. That's about it. The user creation / synching and SSO would be slightly trickier, but even then if you're comfortable with Symphony you wouldn't likely have a problem.

As far as building an ecommerce platform yourself goes, there's also taxes, shipping, coupons, discounts, recurring billing, downloadables, etc. And PCI compliance, which is a whole mess of fun ;)

I'd just query the API as needed.

Gotcha.

As far as building an ecommerce platform yourself goes, there's also taxes, shipping, coupons, discounts, recurring billing, downloadables, etc. And PCI compliance, which is a whole mess of fun ;)

Yes. :-) Whether this job ends up using FoxyCart or not probably depends on the developer that will be doing it more than me, as the shop in question doesn't require all of those things. But for shops that do I expect FoxyCart would be easier. I suppose there are pros (taxes, shipping, coupons, discounts, recurring billing, downloadables) and cons (having to sync/create users and SSO).

Thanks again for your input.

Sounds like an interesting project! I'm interested in working with you as a Symphony developer. I have built several client sites on Symphony and it is definitely my CMS of choice. If you are looking for help, send me an email

info at blue cube associates . com

and we can discuss the project specifics.

I know this is an old conversation, but in case anyone is interested in FoxyCart they have a webinar on the 17th April, 19:00 UTC (GMT). I hope to attend.

@bluecube, sorry for not replying. The project went ahead in Symphony and was fine. Online payment wasn't a requirement, and orders are saved in Symphony via the Dynamic Text Group extension.