Little Tree Software - West Midlands bespoke software and website developers

Hi there,

Once again a busy few weeks for Little Tree Software. Chestnut has moved on leaps and bounds in terms of functionality with the new permissions model in place. However, tagging has seen slower progress due to our high aims. I’ll explain…..

Our main goals for tagging are:

1. Allow the Chestnut Administrator to create Category tags for products such as Electrical->Kitchen->Blenders.
2. Allow an infinite number of sub categories such as Electrical->Kitchen->Blenders->Silver Blenders->Three Blade->Titanium->Nth Category
3. Chestnut will build it’s product navigation system from these ‘Catergory’ tags and provide intuitive methods of browsing the store
4. Use Attribute tags to allow dynamic customisation of product attributes. As products, a bottle of wine will have very different attributes to a book or car, yet it should be easy to add new types of product
5. Allow full scale search across both Category and Attribute tags.

So, where have we got to? After three initial design experiments, we are about 50% through our list of aims. One of the biggest design changes we have made is the use of user customisable attribute tags. Although powerful, this has impacted several key areas of Chestnut such as product creation and management. Many questions arose from this such as how we could allow administrators and sellers to change the display order of their product attributes.

We have decided to take the time to get tagging right and provide a system that is both powerful but easy to use. So far the balance isn’t quite their yet, but it will be.

Stay tuned. If you have any comments or questions for us, let us know.

The Little Tree Team

Happy new year to you all.

Its been a busy time here at Little Tree since the last chance we got to update the blog, so here is an overview of our activites.

We are currently adding some permissions functionality to our Chestnut. Originally we had decided that there would be three types of users in our system: users, resellers and administrators. However, after reflecting we decided that this simply was not flexible or powerful enough for Chestnut or our clients, which highlighted that a new approach was needed.

The challenge was to allow Chestnut to be sold to two different areas of E-Commerce:

1. A company which allows other companies to sell their products using Chestnut
2. A company which just wants to sell their own products

These have distinct differences which needed to be catered for. After discussions and some design meetings, the permission model was created and we are currently implementing this into Version 1 of Chestnut. Version 2 will see permissions being editable for administrators of Chestnut.

As we outlined in the last post, we are also currently working on tagging which will play a major part in Version 1 of Chestnut.

We envisage a working version of Chestnut to be available towards the end of January and we look forward to making a demonstration of Chestnut available around the same time.

The Little Tree Team