[ic] Frustrated with IC 4.8

Jim Balcom interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
Mon Sep 17 19:43:01 2001


On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Leon Harris wrote:

LH>>up. Personally, I have nearly quit it on at least 2 occasions. If I were with a
LH>>larger company, and not spending my own cash (which is always short, as
LH>>distinct from time which can be found from other projects)  on developing this,
LH>>I would probably advise them to spend money on getting a proprietary product
LH>>with a shorter learning curve and better support, if one existed.

I don't think that there is one.

I looked at MiniVend and tried to set it up and threw up my hands, for the
various reasons that are being cited here over and over. I went with
commerce.cgi for quite a while. It is excellent software and I was able to
easily modify it to suit. It does not have zone-based shipping, which is
vital for me.

I went through a half dozen other products, paying for each one, including
$500 for ShopSite, only to find that they were all seriously lacking in
the essential elements for a store.

One of my vendors is running a package called (I think) BroadView. They tell
me that they paid many thousands of dollars for it. Out of my budget. And,
the operators there are suffering just as I am.

Very early this year, I dug in deeper to IC. I gave up on it again. I
fumbled along on commerce.cgi for a while longer and finally realized that
it was never going to be what I wanted. I was trying to customize a Chevy
Geo to be a Grand Am (my favorite car!)

InterChange is not for the faint of heart. IC is not for people new to
Linux, nor new to servers. It has a very steep learning curve. It took me 6
months to get my store open and on-line. (My first computer was a SOL-20 by
Processor Technology in 1976. I've been around a while!) The documentation
is absolutely terrible. In this latest round of documentation revisions it
became very clear that the documentation would never be written at a level
low enough that I could understand it. And, I view this as a serious
shortcoming to IC.

And, yet, once the store is open and orders are pouring in because of the
professional appearance of the presentation, and the high level of power of
IC it all becomes worth it.

I honestly think that the best thing that could happen to IC in 2001 is to
halt all programming on it, halt all improvements, and to complete a full
set of documentation that, while not an 'IC For Dummies' would be comparable
to a Sam's book on IC. Something that, at least, I could understand, and
hopefully people with far less computer know-how than I.

With decent documentation, it would not bother me, in the least, to pay for
Interchange.

-= Jim =-

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Tagline for Monday, September 17, 2001 at 19:20 PM:
Brain: The apparatus with which we think that we think.

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