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devshb
Senior Member
United Kingdom
1904 Posts |
 Posted - August 17 2007 : 03:55:03
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The shopclosed thing is a pretty vital aspect, especially for shops that undergo maintenance quite often or who close for holidays etc.
The only potential problem/catch is that vpasp as a cart is huge, so expanding the shopclosed logic might not be too high on the priority list, but on the other hand some merchants/site-owners do want/need specific options.
There's also the situation whereby a site owner might want to access all the customer functions while the site is closed (eg for testing following an upgrade, or during installation), but not let their customers use them.
And another aspect to consider is that vpasp might only be one element on a site; a site could also have separate areas such as forums, blogs, support areas etc etc, and you might also want to close those down at the same time (or at least have the option of closing them down individually)
Anyway, the upshot is that I reckon anything to do with these aspects is probably best done by a separate dedicated tool (mind you, I'm biased I guess because we've created such a tool) -
Site Suspender:
http://www.bigyellowzone.com/shopexd.asp?id=147
That'll let you close the site for the customers while you can enter a password from a special url and temporarily override the closed-site check for your browser session. Very useful for when you do upgrades/installs etc.
What we want to do is keep that tool constantly reviewed/updated according to feedback that we get (that's one of the reasons I think a dedicated/separate tool is a good idea, as it's more responsive to feedback than an entire cart as it's much easier to maintain/upgrade as a separate entity, and it also means that the tool can be used outside vpasp)
That tool is generic (ie it's not just for vpasp; you can use it on anything that uses asp)
The tool was only released a couple of weeks ago, but the notes in this topic are interesting ones and give us a few pointers to how we could enhance it on the next version. Given the other comments in this topic I think enhancing the tool to have a config list where you can specify individual files and their corresponding down-for-maintenance urls would be a good thing to add. That way you could add "shopaddtocart.asp" and "shopcustomer.asp" to a specific list of urls in the config options, while also still being able to close-down the entire cart if you wanted to. If more than a handful of people would like that then we'd definitely add it to the addon.
We're open to ideas on this front regarding the addon, and as it's quite an easy addon to maintain from our side the changes would be done pretty quickly and people who'd bought it in the last 6 months would get a free upgrade as per our other addons.
We've used the tool for several client sites while doing upgrades/installs etc, and it's been really useful, and it's comforting to know that while testing things out ourselves normal visitors still don't get to see the site and all the convert/create/diag files are safe from hackers during the installation/upgrade.
Simon Barnaby
Developer
[email protected]
www.BigYellowZone.com
Web Design, Online Marketing and VPASP addons |
Edited by - devshb on August 17 2007 04:38:22 |
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