This has been startet as an unorderet list of various requirements and usage scenarios which may have an impact to the core implementation. There are also some Items, which should not have an impact on the core implementation.
The goal of this list is to sort out stuff which should be done in some kind of extension package or app on their own.
This list will have to be sorted in some way to (hopefully) become useful imput.
Most models need to be translatable.
Shops normally sell some kind of product. These products may be very differnt, so the trick here is to stay very flexible and extensible.
See Products for current discussion details.
Shops are often organized by some kind of Category implementation. Products may be assosiated to one (or multiple) categories in which they should be shown.
Should Products know anything about Categories?
Alternatives may be to organize products by tags.
Categories should be implemented as an efficient tree (mptt).
Is a Customer always a User?
Can Organisations be Customers?
Should Customers be Contacts with a special role?
During the checkout process a Cart is transformed into an Order (?). In pseudocode this would look like this:
my_order = checkout(my_cart)
(checkout() is the complicated part here)
An Order needs to contain copies of some data in case the referred items change. Kind of historical data. Cases:
An Order also contains prices. The Cart itself does not need to contain price information. (?)
Every shop also contains some sort of pages which should be managed by a CMS.
Important: Integration of navigation.
This should be implemented in its own app.
Some models (e.g. Product, Category) may will have images attached to them.
The handling of images (most often scaling) can be done by template tags like sorl does. This should have no impact on core models and left to the shop implementor.
Shops may be seen as a frontent to ERP-Systems and should sometimes be connected to these systems. It may also be possible that product data should be taken from external sources and be processed by the shop system.
These extensions should only use the core models but not influence them in any kind. Meta-Information which may be required could be stored well in their own models which contain a relativ to the basic Product model (or other core models).
When data should be propagated outbound, they can attach signal-handlers to appropriate signals.
It may be appropriate to add some general patterns / best practices to the docs.
Although this is a common shop feature, this can be seen as a generic kind of “bookmark list” which contains a list of django models.
Outbound notifications of nearly any kind could be implemented by using appropriate signals of core models. So this should have not too much influence to core stuff.
Use Cases:
Maybe some custom signals should provided here.
They are just available as a very generic app, nothing to be done here. (?)