openSteam 0.9.1

openSteam is a generic approach to a web-based shopping and eCommerce platform.

As a webagency (www.diamonddogs.cc) we have a lot of experience in designing and implementing shop solutions. 'Till now we used open-source projects or large commercial shopping systems as basis for our implementations. In some cases we even started from scratch. This approach was not very satisfying, so we decided to built our own platform with the following strategic objectives:

Flexibility over all while not ending up in configuration hell or writing heavy weighted frameworks.

· Flexibility in UI design
· Flexibility in offered goods, products and services
· Flexibility in the shopping process and its workflows

openSteam is implemented with ruby on rails Ruby on Rails. Using the concepts of generators, modules, plug-ins, REST and last but not least convention over configuration, we realize all the tools you need to run your own eCommerce site.

A team of full time professionals will push this project in the next 12 months.

Here are some key features of "openSteam":

General Features

· Product Listing
· Details-Page for Products
· a Shopping-Cart (add, delete, incremen/decrement quantity, checkout)
· a Checkout-Process

an Admin-Backend to:

· create and configure Products
· create and configure Properties
· overview Order and Customer Information

Generators

openSteam offers three new generators (to use with script/generate):

· create a new webshop in no-time with script/generate opensteam WebShopName
· create new products (like scaffold for models products) script/generate opensteam_product ProductName [column:type]
· create new properties for products (like "color" for "Shirt") with script/generate opensteam_property PropertyName [column:type]

Flexibility in Products

· create new Product-Models with a generator
· associate Products to Properties (a "Shirt" has_many "Colors")
· give the Product a price and a storage-quantity
· give specific configurations a price and a storage-quantity (a "blue-Shirt" is more expensive than a "yellow-Shirt")
· mark specific configurations as "Not-Active" or "Back-Ordered"

What's New in This Release:

· Rails 2.1 compatible
· create Invoices and Shipments for an Order and even for Order-Items
· mark an Order, an Invoice or a Shipment as 'pending' or 'finished'. Or even create your own states and state-specific logic using modules.
· a whole new Admin-Backend (overview and process orders, manage admins and/or customers, etc)
· sortable and searchable tables in the admin-backend
· a simple search form, finally!



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