How to setup a donations page for a charity website? [closed] - e-commerce

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I need to help a human rights organisation to setup a donation page at their website. They have tried PayPal and GlobalGiving and they found some glitches with these services like ceiling, transaction fees, etc. They want to setup their own mechanism. So what are the possible options and how much programming is needed? Is there any free-open source e-commerce or charity modules available?

Sounds like you are looking for something very customizable here, what I would recommend you is to do some custom coding or leverage solution like wufoo. You can build as simple as a form that whole bunch of fields and sends all these result to paypal or other payment gateways. Leveraging pre-built solution like wufoo is often recommended for non-technical people and/or simple, quick tasks like this.
(Alternatively) Most well-known applications like drupal, Joomal, wordpress (you name the rest) have fairly good support/module on this area, however, most of them require some degree of customizations and often become an overkill solution (mainly because of the learning curve).

You might look into Google Checkout. It's not free, but they do have an option tailored to non-profits (link).
The main benefit of going with them is that you won't need to set up a direct relationship with a CC merchant gateway, which can be a good sized hassle, especially for a smaller nonprofit. To me, the other benefit is that it keeps you far away from Raiser's Edge / Blackbaud, purveyors of some of the most awful donation pages I've ever had the misfortune to see or use.

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How to describe a platform to non-developers? [closed]

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I've been trying to describe the concept of platforms to some non-developer people on my team. I'm trying to explain how platforms are more than just tools and environments. For example, the Facebook Platform. How to describe the fact that the platform is more than just the website, but includes protocols like XFBML, opengraph, etc.
Facebook Platform is one example, but I would be interested if anyone has an abstracted way to describe what 'platforms' are in the tech world. I've had difficulty explaining this concept before in situations unrelated to flash.
Analogies that aren't tech related would be helpful as well.
I would say something about it being all-inclusive and extending to include all functionality that the entire ecosystem around that particular piece of software needs to thrive.
The Wikipedia page might help in putting it into words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_platform
I use a "restaurant" metaphor, myself: Think of the kitchen, the bar, the dining room as components to the platform. How the decor can change in the dining room without changing the function, but can affect how customers perceive the business. How the recipes instruct the cooks, and the interactions with the wait staff can all affect different aspects of the business much like different pieces of your platform can be modified to affect different aspects of your business. Oh, and don't forget management!

Decent tool for producing a glossary of technical terms [closed]

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I'm currently developing the front end of a new CMS for a digital streaming company, the main problem the project has is keeping track of the technical language that has sprung up around it.
It currently involves around 60 staff in four countries, aside from a wiki (which has thus far failed to be kept up-to-date), anyone have any good tools or tips for building and maintaining a glossary for a project like this?
aside from a wiki (which has thus far failed to be kept up-to-date)
This comment makes me pretty nervous about suggesting other solutions. Wiki's can come with their own problems, but keeping it up to date is not a problem inherent in the platform. It's a cultural or organizational problem. A wiki provides a very easy way to track and update data. If, today, you cannot keep it up to date, ask yourself how you will solve this problem if you change the tool?
Changing to another platform could solve things like: The wiki isn't scalable for that amount of data; we want to make controlled edits; we need to release in multiple languages; we need to release in other formats.
For the updating problem, try something simple to start, like assigning a dedicated team member to glossary maintenance. They don't have to be the only contributor, but if you have someone who is dedicated to paying some attention to this area you will have a much better chance of keeping things up to date.
In an untended garden, it's not the fault of the soil that you have no flowers.
DITA has a glossary specialization. You can maintain a central company glossary in it. In individual company documents, you create a mini glossary topic then use a content reference to pull any terms you need into your document.
It does sound more like a version control issue though.

tips on building my first ecommerce site [closed]

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I've just taken on a client who needs a subscription based ecommerce site created using ProductCart software. I'm pretty handy with PHP so I should be able to figure out the software. My question is - what are some things i should be aware of when creating a subscription based ecommerce site? What types of questions should I be asking the client? I need to get more specifics from them regarding the different subscription levels and periods, but what other specifics should I get nailed down? I appreciate any help anyone can give.
thanks...
I would highly, highly, HIGHLY (can I make it any more clear) recommend reading and understanding almost everything on this question: What should a developer know before building a public web site?
It outlines all the big things you need to know about Security and Performance for Public Websites, a lot of which apply to e commerce sites. (When people's money is involved, it needs to work right).
Furthermore, you should make sure any certificates you should have are there, encryption, etc.
For Client's Specific Needs:
Signing Up:
Do they want to have promo codes to discount stuff?
Is there a trial period?
Billing:
When does billing occur? (Probably should be doled out throughout the month)
Should there be an interface to change the billing date?
Leaving:
How long does Customer Information stick around?
How much access does a person have to the site when they unsubscribe
Is there a day of grace period (Useful for file-storage sites)
Some of this stuff might be dictated by the package you are using, but still good to have figured out.
smashing magazine has a nice article on things to look for when designing an e-commerce site.
Be sure to ask what types of payment they want to accept. Credit cards? Which ones? E-checks? Paypal? Google checkout? Are card numbers being stored on the payment gateway? If not are you PCI compliant? Do you already have SSL? If not, who's getting the SSL cert? How do you want to handle refunds? Are cancellations pro-rated? Do you want to support affiliates? Do you want to have discount codes? Do subscriptions have setup fees?

Software Environment Documentation Checklist [closed]

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I work for a insurance company. We have our own development department made-up of almost 150 people plus some providers (outsourcing and custom made apps pretty much). In our company my team have made what we call non-functional logic libraries. That is, software libraries to handle things that are horizontal to all the development teams in our department, e.g. Security, Webservices, Logging, Messaging and so on. Most or these tools are either made from scratch or adaptation of a de-facto standard. For example our logger is an appender based on Log4J that also saves the logging messages into a DB. We also define what libraries to use in the application, for example which framework for webservices to use. We use pretty much JavaEE and Oracle AS in all our organization (with some Websphere Application servers).
Much of these projects have their architecture documented (use cases, UML diagrams, etc) and generally the generated documentation are available.
Now what we have seen is that for users sometimes is difficult to use the the libraries we provide and the are constantly asking question or they simply don't use them.
So we are planning to generate a more friendly documentation for them, so my question is:
What are the best practices or the checklist that software documentation should have?
Something comes to my mind:
API Reference guide
Quick start Tutorial
API Generated Documentation.
Must be searchable
Web Access
What else should it have? Also, based in your experience what is the best way to maintain (keep it up-to-date) and publish this type of documentation?
Keep your documentation in version control too.
Make sure on every page it has a version number so you know where your user has been reading from.
Get a CI server going and push documentation to a LIVE documentation site upon updates.
Do documentation reviews like you would code reviews.
Dog-food it :)
Kindness,
Dan

OSCommerce alternatives [closed]

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I'm looking to evaluate a few opensource e-commerce solutions. Are there any good alternatives to OSCommerce out there ?
I've looked at Thelia and Magento so far, are there any others that are worth looking at ?
They should be :
Free as in freedom
Easy to maintain / extend
Coded in PHP or Python (ideally, but I'm open-minded)
There are forks of OSCommerce such as CRELoaded, although that doesn't change much in terms of the basic calculus, it just may have some additional features that you care about.
I had experience with CRELoaded/OSCommerce. I found the code base pretty bad, with UI and logic mixed in everywhere, with no good control over the architecture and what code goes where.
You said free as in freedom, so I'm going to throw this out (although I think the technology is Java). Fry is not at all free as in beer (several hundred thousand short of free), but whatever they implement you get full source code (at least according to their sales pitch when I was looking at them). I suspected that this was because they used GPL stuff in their stack, but I don't know.
Another good one is Magento, I have heard good things about both. I also in the past used ClickCart Pro and it was nice a couple of years ago.
For those who may be interested, I ended up discovering and selecting PrestaShop.
It is coded in PHP/MySQL, highly configurable, very modular by design and the codebase is really clean and well-organized. A crapload of opensource and paying modules are available to extend the functionnality if needed.
zen cart
Very vague. Alternative in what way, in that they can also host products? Hav a CMS? Built in features? Configurable? Themable? What are you looking for?
Isn't this more of a google query?
How about using opencart ? It is released under GNU GPL