Tag: systems

Context

I work as a publisher for a small publishing house. As the only person with computer skills, I also play the role of a de facto computer scientist, including the server administrator for our website. There was a real computer scientist, but he left a few years ago and I took over. We have an online store on our website, but the online store and the website itself were coded about 15 years ago by the former computer scientist, from scratch, to Classic ASP (bweurk ), using absolutely no type of coding standard (except, apparently, "Make this code as spaghetti as possible and as unreadable as possible" – a strategy that frequently involves named variables in Farsi that unfortunately I do not do not speak). As a result, it is difficult to maintain and make changes.

I'm now starting to look for ways to modernize the site and migrate it to a content management system. The site itself is not really a problem – there are a lot of things that I will have to redo and delete, but the static parts are just static pages and should be fairly easily implemented in any good CMS. The real problem is the online store.

The problem

The current online store draws its data from an already extensive MSSQL database, containing several thousand products available, their various data spread over fifteen different tables. Existing customers and orders are stored in the same database (in different tables, of course).

I had never set up a website with an ecommerce solution, but from what I read about WooCommerce, Magento and similar solutions, a common thread for migrating existing sites towards them seems to be that the underlying product data needs to migrate to a new e-commerce system-oriented database.

Ideally, I would like to avoid doing this for several reasons:

• The existing database is quite large (about 3.5 GB) and there are many parts of it for which I do not even know what a given table is for – I'm not quite sure what that we must migrate and what not to do. to migrate, and I'm anticipating headaches
• Migration would require (I guess?) Juggling two different database structures at the same time
• There is already a fairly complete administration module on the site that allows us to create, edit and control products. I would much rather not have to redo all this module to install a new database, because it is really the largest and most complex part of the site.

The ideal solution, as far as I know, would be an ecommerce system designed to rely on interfaces to represent various aspects of online shops (products, customers, etc.), rather than d & # 39; use built-in classes linked to a database with a specific structure. In this way, I could write my own classes that retrieve the relevant data from the relevant tables in the existing database, just by expanding the correct interfaces and providing the methods with methods to correctly return the relevant data.

There are probably similar ways to do it: the interfaces were the cleanest I could imagine. I have therefore thought that someone could have created an ecommerce system that works in this way.

I tried to search for something like this, both on Google and on the StackExchange sites (mainly here and StackOverflow), but without success. All I receive seems to be very generic: "How to create an online store?" Pages or very specific question and answer pages about a particular problem with a content management system or an ecommerce solution – just as useless for the needs that I present myself. So, I turn to ask here.

The site is hosted on a Windows server running IIS 8, so it must be able to run on this platform.

The question, simply asked

What I'm looking for is a combination of CMS and e-commerce that:

• can be integrated with each other
• works on IIS 8
• supports some form of middleware to extract and write data to the database (possibly via interfaces, perhaps in another way) for the e-commerce part
• is preferably written in PHP because that's what I know best.
• is free / open source (preferably – money is absolutely an obstacle)

Does such an e-commerce solution exist?

Remarks:

1. I am do not search for answers suggesting hiring professionals for data migration and creating an updated site. There is simply no money for that; this premise of the question is not modifiable.

2. I wondered if I should post here, on StackOverflow or ServerFault, but overall, it seemed more like a webmaster request than a coding request or server administrator; so I opted for this site.