Project Overview
MarenaGroup is a manufacture for a number of medical body products like body suits, vests, sleeves and abdominal benders, that serve both men and women. Our customer wants to take his business online and be able to make MarenaGroup’s products available online so customers can efficiently use a high quality online catalog and store. MarenaGroup decided to assign InspirationGate the task of creating and skinning the online store using AspDotNetStorefront and DotNetNuke.
The most important points that the solution has to cover are the ability to easily browse the existing products, have full support for shipping and online payment and finally be compatible with the most browsers in use especially FireFox, Internet Explorer and Safari.
Challenges
- Due to our large experience in developing both AspDotNetStorefront and DotNetNuke applications the only challenge we had was skinning the application, this part was challenging because we had to consider the skinning rules and best practices in both products. Our development teams toke the challenge and we successfully delivered the application working on all the requested browsers.
Provided Solution
Our development team provided a solution that has an AspDotNetStorefront components hosted inside DotNetNuke portal. This approach allowed us to follow dotNetNuke skinning and styling practices when implementing features related to the portal itself and follow AspDotNetStorefront when the feature is specific to the store.
Most of the development activities were focused on accomplishing two tasks
- Developing XSLT files to be used by AspDotNetStorefront rendering engine to render the store, the real challenge in writing these XML files was to make it compatible with the requested browsers, also our team was responsible to extend the functionality of the XSLT rendering engine by implementing a number of C# components and plug them in the rendering cycle.
- Adjusting the CSS and the HTML files to make the store smoothly blend with the portal and make them look like one platform.
The below architecture diagram illustrates the containment and dependency between the components used to develop the solution.
The application is implemented as DotNetNuke Modules, these modules depends on DotNetNuke in providing the security and the integrity with the rest of the portal components.
DotNetNuke skinning was completed according to the framework specified by DotNetNuke development team and it is fully compatible with FireFox, Internet Explorer and safari.
AspDotNetStorefront development activities focused on the store skinning with special attention to cross browser compatibility.
Technologies
DotNetNuke, AspDotNetStorefront ML/DNN, C#, .Net Framework, SQL Server 2005 and XSLT
Customer Feedback
"Flawless experience. The provider was upfront about what the project would entail and delivered on all promises without exception. Provided ample documentation and fantastic over-the-phone demo and walkthrough of the finished product. They even fixed a couple things that were outside the scope of this project but were requisites to get the project to 100% - I didn't even have to ask. Excellent provider. Highly recommended. I will definitely to business with them again."