Posts tagged with “shopping cart”

Flaws?

Monday, 2 March, 2009

Last September, I posted about a somewhat odd exchange between myself and the developer of a competing shopping cart plugin, over a troll whom, in the end, wound up attacking both plugins.

Since then, I’ve come across a few negative comments about YAK on various forums — interestingly, in none of these cases has the poster actually contacted me. All too similar to the original troll.

The usual process, when there’s been a real issue with YAK, is that someone lets me know, I fix said issue (or otherwise try to resolve), and release a new version. So far, I’ve only been notified about one legitimate hole in the code (quickly fixed), and (at least, as far as I can recall) haven’t left any major flaws outstanding for great lengths of time. So I haven’t been enormously worried about the odd malcontent.

That said, I occasionally google to see what’s being said out there, and came across the following gem (from the aforementioned plugin developer).

If you want to throw up an image with a price in a page or a post then by all means use YAK. But if you want the real deal then [competing-plugin] is built on years of e-Commerce knowledge and has plenty of important features for people wanting to SELL Online – such as the ability to interface with many payment gateways, the ability to interface with shipping companies, and much much more

(Note: I’ve removed the name of the plugin because I’ve thus far tried to avoid actually naming the individual involved).

This was posted sometime after May last year, but I do feel the need to make a couple of comments, even though it’s almost a year old:

1. What’s your definition of important feature? Get a group of users together, and I guarantee they won’t come up with the same list.
2. YAK now supports a number of payment gateways (PayPal standard, PayPal Pro, Authorize.net and basic Google Checkout integration)
3. Okay, it doesn’t directly interface with shipping companies — but the shipping calculation is relatively flexible, and I’m always open to suggestions.
4. YAK as a project has now been actively (if intermittently) developed for 3 years. So I’d say it also fulfills the assertion: “built on years of e-Commerce knowledge”. :-P

UPDATE: here’s another interesting comment (by someone called Mccormicky) which I came across after posting this:

Yak cart is another you might consider if you don’t mind repairing tables in mysql. I did it and I am no expert.
Yak is not that supported either-there isn’t even an onsite tutorial for setting it up and the readme contains nothing about where to put the hooks! I was amazed.

It looks like fairly obvious trolling, given that (at the time it was posted) there was certainly a basic tutorial for YAK setup, and at the time I don’t recall being contacted about any “table repair” problems. Weird.

10,000 came and went…

Tuesday, 3 February, 2009

As a matter of interest I went back and had a look at the number of downloads for the earlier versions of YAK, back when it was hosted at SourceForge. The number was a lot higher than I remembered and, added to the 4781 (at time of writing) downloads since WordPress has been hosting it, means the 10,000-downloads milestone came and went… completely uncommented upon.

YAK is now (almost officially) a three year old project. I started the SourceForge project (March 06) about a month or so after I’d started mucking around with the code itself. It started, from a rather simple idea, and over time has turned into a product that, I believe, is reasonably competitive in terms of features. Not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but good enough for a part-time project that has only had time to evolve, rather than be properly designed.

YAK looks a bit like an “also-ran” compared to the number of downloads for the alternative cart plugins on WordPress, but when you look at the real figure (currently 11,635) it’s actually almost holding its own. Not quite so sure why it rates so low (I certainly haven’t received an enormous number of complaints, and I’ve attempted to fix most, if not all, of the bugs that have been reported) — could be the lack of free documentation, or something else I haven’t thought of.

Still, to the few thousand or so people (I’m guessing) who have amassed 11,000+ downloads over the last few years, to the (unfortunately smaller ;-) ) number who have bought the handbook, and the various contributors who have offered patches, bug fixes, translations, suggestions, etc — thanks for all your support.

YAK version 1.2.3

Monday, 2 February, 2009

YAK for WordPress version 1.2.3 has finally been released. Features include in this release, since the last stable version (1.1.3) include:

  • a basic xml feed for products
  • remote function for retrieving the content of a product from another YAK store
  • Accounts Receivable payment type
  • Authorize.net payment type
  • PayPal Payments Pro payment type
  • fix zip code/state handing in PayPal for US addresses
  • add state to address form (automatic switch between state and region depending upon country code)
  • add more filtering to the order administration page
  • Norwegian translation, provided by Tom Boersma
  • updated French translation, provided by Romaric Drigon

Bug fixes include:

  • price formatting in confirmation message
  • minor problem in reports
  • layout issue with out-of-stock message
  • minor problem with 2.7 layout
  • fix dodgy address handling, explicitly store country codes for PayPal address problem

Download as usual from the WordPress Extend site, here.

Almost Released…

Sunday, 14 December, 2008

YAK 1.2.0-beta is now downloadable from the WordPress Plugins Directory.

At the moment, this release includes: a basic xml feed and the facility to pull product details from those feeds into another YAK installation; an accounts receivable payment type; support for Authorize.net and PayPal Payments Pro; along with a few bug fixes.

Note: this is a beta release, so test well if you want to install on a production site.