Not answered AspDotNetStoreFront integration

A while back, in this thread (
http://www.sitefinity.com/support/forums/support-forum-thread/b1043S-mcahd.aspx ), it was suggested that integration with AspDotNetStoreFront was planned.  Has there been any progress on that front?  I'm just about ready to start a project that will require a shopping cart with Sitefinity, and so far there doesn't seem to be many choices. 

Someone in that thread mentioned BV Commerce, but I rather like ASPDNSF. 

Regards,
Mike Sharp

Hi Mike,

Thanks for contacting us.

At this time, we have not made any progress with installing AspDotNetStoreFront with Sitefinity. Although I cannot give you any step by step instructions for implementing it with Sitefinity, we have made progress on implementing PayPal functionality with our CMS. Let me contact a customer who has implemented this solution and he will get back to you.

Sincerely yours,
Joe
the Telerik team

Thanks Joe,

I spoke with the folks at AspDotNetStoreFront, and integration doesn't seem very workable, because they use their own proprietary skinning tokens, which require the web pages to inherit from their classes.  IMHO, that seems like its a silly decision, considering there are more "ASP.NET-like approaches that would be much more interoperable.  I can't understand why they would write their own page parser, when ASP.NET is already parsing the page.

Unfortunately, while PayPal might be useful for some of my other projects, it won't help me with this one. 

I guess I have only a few choices here:

dashCommerce
BV Commerce
BigTree's product

Thanks,
Mike

I have used ASPDNSF before for DNN. While it has many features, it is indeed cumbersome as small modifications require extensive work and/or the purchase of the source code which is an additional $995 or whereabouts.

I was not impressed with it as far as value for money. The documentation is not very good as well and the support I received was incredibly delayed and unproductive. Certainly not worth the $1500 that I spent on it.

The only way I would like to see it integrated with Sitefinity is if it becomes much easier to customize.

Sitefinity is beautiful in its simplicity and ASPDNSF, in my opinion, would ruin it.

Hi Mike,

Joe from Telerik asked me to follow up on this post. I successfully implemented PayPal on my site by using the Products Module, making the buttons on PayPal, using their cart and their checkout. Here is how I did it:

1. I created the Products Module and I added a few products to it.
2. I created a PayPal Premier account and signed up for Website Payment Standard
3. When you login to your PayPal account, click on Merchant Services > Add to Cart
4. Complete the form and on the next page, save the code for the button
5. Add that code to the product that you made in the products module

Everything in PayPal communicates via query strings, so you can also add custom headers and footers to the PayPal shopping cart and checkout by adjusting those links. Here's an article for more info on that.

Let me know if you have any PayPal questions.

~John

chris_cf - Thanks for that info.  I guess I'm glad I didn't buy it already.  I started getting suspicious when they wouldn't let me see any code examples or get any real information without buying it first. 

John - While I'm not sure PayPal will work for this particular project (they have over 3,000 items), I found your information on the Products module VERY interesting.  That's exactly what I want to do.  I don't know why I didn't see that before--thanks for the heads-up! 

If someone were to implement a generic shopping cart application and payment processing gateway as a server control, they'd make a fortune, I think.  It seems like every shopping cart out there expects to run the entire site.

Thanks guys,
Mike

I agree. A well made shopping cart that can integrate with SF would be great.

Hi,

We think for such a module for a long time already. There is even an open source project for Sitefinity eCommerce module that you can check out - http://code.google.com/p/commercefinity/.
Mike, we have some ideas for the Products module, and we will our update our documentation for it soon.

Kind regards,
Georgi
the Telerik team

I am trying to integrate a membership / subscripton from ASPDNSF to Sitefinity with great difficulty.
My temporary solution is to have the client manually enter subscribers into the asp.net membership database that is a secondary membership provider for SF.
HELP - I am not able to save first name / last name in the SF interface for editing users that are in the SQLPRovider group.  The schema for the membership database is not that same as for the SF membership - how can I fix this?

Hey Dave,

Sorry to hear you're having problems with them.

Sitefinity is using the same membership and role providers from ASP.NET 2.0, so it is not proprietary. I assume AspDotNetStoreFront is using the ASP.NET 2.0 Membership and Role providers for their system, am I correct? I'd find it difficult to believe they are using their own system, since this would make it incredibly hard to integrate it with Sitefinity. Plus, there's no need to re-invent the wheel.

If they are using those providers, you need to point their database to Sitefinity's Membership and Role providers. You just need to change the connection string on those providers. This article has more info:

http://www.sitefinity.com/support/knowledge-base/cb-article/b1154K-bakk-b1154T-cmb.aspx

Sitefinity's login controls- login and create a user wizard - are the same ones from Visual Studio, so they are also using the ASP.NET 2.0 providers I discussed. Likely, those controls don't have the provider set up.

~John

Hi,

Although this might not be an alternative to AspDotNetStoreFront, an article about using PayPal and Sitefinity was recently published. For more advanced users, this can be combined with the products module. The PayPal article describes how to use buttons from PayPal for each product, so this is easy to combine with th products module. Simply make the product, then go to PayPal and fill out their form. They'll give you a link and an image. Insert the image and give it the link from PayPal.

Greetings,
Joe
the Telerik team