Ektron Developer's Guide: Building an Ektron Powered Website

Chapter 13. Constructing the Online Storefront with eCommerce

• What are the eCommerce server controls and how do you implement with them?

• How do you create a custom order workflow?

• How do you build a payment gateway provider?

The last chapter closely investigated the eCommerce feature and how it relates to the Workarea. It dealt with configuring the basic setup for eCommerce, and you learned how to create catalogs and products. What you didn't do at all in that chapter was work with the eCommerce feature from a developer's perspective. That's what you'll approach in this chapter.

The eCommerce Framework is exciting due to the way it addresses the developer experience in one of the most open portions of the Ektron Framework. While at a high level it closely resembles working with the rest of the framework, with a set of easily deployable server controls and out-of-the-box functionality, it also provides a large number of programmatic hooks so you can customize the capabilities to a large degree.

This chapter starts by looking in depth at the server control set that the eCommerce feature provides, exploring each control's capabilities and customizability. You will learn when they are used, and how to use them. You then take a close look at how the eCommerce experience was developed for the OnTrek site, looking specifically at the product browsing experience and the ordering experience. You'll find that the out-of-the-box implementation is sufficient for most of these needs.

You will then ...