About eComDelta.com

Overview of what's here on this site for you, design objectives and mission statement.

eComDelta.com's Objectives:
The eComDelta.com site serves two key objectives. First, it provides a fundamental starting point for demonstration and proof of concept. The core methodologies used here, source code and best practices are well documented and freely available. It is our primary objective that others might benefit from our experience as we have from the work of so many others. Secondly, to demonstrate a working knowledge in the areas we profess to be expert in.

Mission Statement:
It is our intent to create a useful code base which others may be able to use as the foundation for practical, functional and comprehensive database driven websites. As we go forward, updates and additional features will be added over time. As a general rule, our project development process roughly follows a Scrum Methodology model.

Available code base that drives this web site (as of Thu,11 Feb 2010) has the following features:

• Database driven content text and category navigation, based on free opensource implementations of PHP/MySQL.
• A fully nested hierarchical category structure that provides practical ease of use and potentially complex inter connections. While the current implementation is very simply, the database structure provides for a much more complex methodology of category connections.
• A flexible implementation of various, freely available, in browser WYSIWYG edit tools. Currently supported within this code base is the use of TinyMCE, CKeditor and WYMeditor. Each of these, as well as a plain text version is available to try online on our demo site livedemo.ecomdelta.com.
• Comprehensive implementation of the basics. Pages labeled with content dates, SEO friendly meta tags and database fields, informative mouse over alt text to supplement page and category names and set of bread crumb links across the top of the page.

Planned development will include the following features:

• Enhanced category editing that allows for multiple redundant paths to the same content. In effect, this will allow categories, content pages or product page to exist with multiple parents. This means any content element can exist in more than one place at time. Who says you can't be in two places at once?
• Cached output that utilizes PHP/Unix shared memory functions. This will allow a given page to have it's output stored in memory so that subsequent visits that page produce no additional I/O to the database or to the file system. In this way, the resource requirements for any web site using our code base will actually be less than flat HTML site would be. 
• Integrated Product Catalog to drive E-Commerce applications and eBay sellers auctions.
• Integrated messaging system that connects inbound email messages with pending order and/or customer relationship management.
• Support for eBay auction template data export.

Note: it is probably important to note that none of the planned features listed above are new to us. These are all features we have implemented in production environments before. The planned new development of these features, being re-developed in a LAMP platform base with an opensource mindset, will allow us to be free of any potential legal entanglements and allow us to freely share the code base to anyone who needs it.