[pmwiki-users] Lateral thought from a newbie

[Joachim Durchholz]

Marc Cooper schrieb:
> Basically, you can use PmWiki as a template engine for the process. For 
> example, to include an invoice on a page: (:invoice:). All invoices for 
> a customer, (:pagelist etc :). Put the shipping value on PmWiki form: 
> {$total_shipping}.

Ah, right. I take my words back and say:
If I were to write an ecommerce framework, I'd seriously consider using 
PmWiki for templating. Also for collaboration on things like article 
descriptions, shop news, sidebars, terms-of-service documents, etc.

However, I still maintain that PmWiki gives you no support for all the 
things that have to do with legal rules or figures&numbers. You'd still 
have to write your own shopping cart, tax&shipping calculations, 
invoices, ToS display, payment checking.

> So, you often spend a lot of time hacking existing code to do what
> you need with the disadvantage that you move away from the core
> product; thus making updates/upgrades time consuming and messy, and
> add-ons might simply no longer work for you. You also have to spend a
> lot of time learning how someone else's code works.

That's very true. I have dabbled with osCommerce, and 90% of the add-ons 
that you install require patching existing code. I'd be very surprised 
if it were even remotely possible to upgrade the base engine without 
reinstalling all the patches, and I don't expect the patches to 
mindlessly apply after such an upgrade. (osCommerce has other design 
flaws. I'm somewhat surprised that it's considered one of the better 
solutions...)

Well, PmWiki could still be of use to an aspiring ecommerce framework 
programmer. Sure, it would be helpful as a templating and collaboration 
engine, but that's the less important contribution. A more important 
contribution would be certain aspects of PmWiki's programming style, 
such as its generally table-driven nature, and that the tables tend to 
contain functions and/or template strings. (Actually that's a set of 
very interesting techniques for any PHP programming that needs 
pluggability.)

Regards,
Jo