DuxCommerce - an Orchard Core commerce module

[duxonline]

Today I'm happy to introduce DuxCommerce - a complete Orchard Core ecommerce solution. I started this project to learn functional programming in Haskell and F# back to 2020 and had been working on the project on and off since then.

In 2022 I decided to migrate it to Orchard Core. It took much longer than I planned. Today I finally have the courage to share it with the community. Any feedback or question is welcome. Thank you.

• Product Listing

• Shopping Cart

• Checkout

• Order Manager

• Your Account

• Product Variants

• Coupons

• Promotions

[giannik]

will it be open sourced?

[duxonline]

will it be open sourced?

It will be free and I am planning to share C# code with people who are interested in this project. I haven't decided on licence yet. I am interested to hear what the community has to say. So everyting is open to discussion at this stage.

[Piedone]

This is very nice, though any particular reason why you didn't instead contribute what you feel missing to Orchard Core Commerce?

[duxonline]

@Piedone first thank you for dojo course. When I was comparing OrchardCore with Umbraco, your course made a difference. Without it, nothing would happen or I might go with Umbraco. Actually when I was watching your videos, I was dreaming about working for Lombiq some day. 😄 That's how impressed I was by the work you guys had done.

There are a few reasons that I started this project instead of contributing to OrchardCore Commerce module. I highlight a couple of them here.

When people ask me for advice on eCommerce solution, I always recommend Shopify because of its ease of use. The ideal solution I want to build is to hide all technical concepts like content fields, content parts, content types, etc, from end users. For example, if a user wants to enable stock tracking for a product, he should be able to do that by ticking a check box. He doesn't have to know product type or an inventory part and how to add inventory part to product type. I think this is a very fundamental difference.

The second reason has to do with coding styles or taste. When I tried to understand Commerce module code, I was struggling because I felt I had to deal with two things at the same time, content management concepts and ecommerce logic. Ecommerce itself is complex enough and adding content management to it frustrated me. A lot of times its code was just over my head. With DuxCommerce, my goal is to deal with one of them at any given time.

There are other reasons as well, but I leave them for another day.

[duxonline]

I do use content parts and content types (for products and categories) in DuxCommerce, but not content fields. This is due to historical reason - much backend logic already existed before migrating to Orchard Core and I was reluctant to change it. This what my content part looks like:

public class ProductPart : DuxPart
{
    public sealed override IRow Row { get; set; } = new ProductRow();
}

public abstract class DuxPart : ContentPart
{
    public abstract IRow Row { get; set; }
}

ProductRow is just a POCO. It is not dependent on Orchard Core. My content parts are just wrappers around POCOs, which I wrote before I run into Orchard Core.

This approach minimizes changes I have to make. Now my backend logic is free of any Orchard Core concepts.

[Piedone]

I see, so you added preexisting code to Orchard Core.

[duxonline]

Yes. There are obviously pros and cons to the approach. The biggest benefit for me is the clear separation of concerns - my backend contains eCommerce logic only, while UI layer focuses on CMS side, using Drivers and Shapes when needed.

There may be other people who would like to run their applications on Orchard Core. Rewriting them from scratch can be very costly or in some cases not realistic. That's why I think this hybrid approach is worth further exploring. I feel like there is not much discussion on this topic.

[Piedone]

I suppose because there are not many insights to share: if you just want to put Orchard Core into your existing ASP.NET Core app without leveraging OC in your existing code, you can just do that with minimal changes. If you do want to leverage OC features, then the work gets harder.

But bringing up case studies like this is definitely useful. Would you like to demo it on the Tuesday meeting? https://docs.orchardcore.net/en/latest/resources/meeting/

[duxonline]

Would love to. I have been pretty busy recently, but can make it happen when things quiet down

[hishamco]

I appreciate your efforts @duxonline let us know when you open source the project, moreover, I suggest to link it in Orchard Core Commerce and contribute to that project as @Piedone suggested unless there are some reasons to driver your project by your own of the community

[giannik]

@duxonline are there plans to open source this ? I like the UI and the simplicity.

[duxonline]

@giannik I'm still working on variant images: https://github.com/orgs/DuxCommerce/projects/4. I haven't made much progress recently due to other commitments.

I am planning to share C# code with people who are interested in the project. Please register your interest here: https://github.com/DuxCommerce/DuxCommerce.Issues/discussions

[giannik]

done