Well, here we are, the end of March. Busy month, this one. The site has been migrated to a new VPS which should offer significant improvements in performance over the previous shared hosting account.

In addition, we have added new software, including this blog and a new Wiki. This in response to two things. First, my discovery that Moodle’s blogging tool was particularly unfriendly about exposing content to the public. Second, we are launching some public development activities and looking at optimal tools to use for community based agile development. We will be posting design documents in the Wiki, and conducting discussion in the forums – a live exercise in Extreme Programming methodology which should benefit the community as a whole.

I’ve gotten quite a workout in templating during the past month or two. For various reasons I’ve templated installations of Account Lab Plus, WhoIS Cart and WHM Complete Solution as well as 3 CRE Loaded based sites. Not my favorite thing to do, or my strongest suite in the eCommerce department, but it has been a good learning experience. The notes resulting from the CRE Loaded templates is going into a Technical Report on ATS Template construction. They are rather rough at the moment, so it may take another month or so before I’m satisfied enough to release it publicly, but it is coming along. I still have several CRE Loaded sites to template, and intend to skin WordPress, SMF and Moodle before finishing this out. By the time I’m done, I’ll have the entire osCommerce University site re-themed around a common layout.

I’m also writing notes and collecting research materials on the components of Magento, a very impressive addition to the Open Source eCommerce field. Especially exciting is their inclusion of a Data Flow Management systems. FINALLY – a shopping cart project that understands the importance of being able to migrate data!

Written for PHP 5, using PDO MySQL and the Zend Framework, this is a different animal with an impressive list of features even though it is only in the 0.9 version. I am looking forward to taking this puppy out for a test drive.

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