Introducing the Isotope, an ecommerce hybrid for TYPOlight

If I remember well, there were already two attempts to create an e-commerce system for TYPOlight. The first of them was abandoned for some reasons. The second is still available and distributed by Fruitmedia company. The latest project, called Isotope, is so far the most promising one.

Fruitmedia’s script is the only stable e-commerce (solution?) for TYPOlight at the moment. The company provides two packages of webShop: Community edition and Buisness edition, but only the first can be used for free. I haven’t tested any of them since there is only German language pack available and I’m not very familiar with Deutsch.

Isotope is an open source project officially started 24th August 2009. It was already being developed a few months before it had an official release. Main developers of this project are Fred Bliss and Blair Winans. The project is sponsored by Winans Creative, where both of them work. Additionally, the project is supported by, known for plenty of TYPOlight extensions, Andreas Schempp.

A Beta program was opened in the September ’09. You can register and become a tester, so you would be able to report bugs and feature requests. There are only 15-20 spots left!

Developers decided to not reinvent the wheel and use the built-in TYPOlight’s features. It definitely shortens the time of development, but also, and maybe more importantly, strongly integrates with TYPOlight.

And so there is no tool to manage shop categories. Instead of categories, subpages will take advantage of handling the product lists. Therefore, no special module for navigation will be needed, as default navigation module will do the job.

It can be said that the principle motivating the authors is “If you know TYPOlight, you know Isotope”. For example, products are displayed using the Isotope(‘s?) listing module and product details – by the reader module. It is the same way that the News module works!

For now, there are only available three payment services: PayPal, Authorize.net and Swiss PostFinance. What is interesting, payment modules can be limited only to specified groups of members, countries, regions or even postal codes.

Of course Isotope has the functions of an average e-commerce system, like a module to manage orders, generate vouchers in PDF, product features (cechy produktu) etc.

One of the biggest advantages of Isotope is that it is able to handle many shops in one TYPOlight. Each can have different layout, products, domains etc.

Isotope in action

The only working website I could find is http://www.ibuycoffee.com/.

Learn more

Watch the official screencasts:

Intro to Isotope

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIIaBt31sz8

Product Variants Widget

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du8Rm9PZmgk

You can also follow the Isotope on Twitter or in this thread.

This post is isnpired by the topic mentioned above and Marcin Lachowski’s review.

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