Little Tree Software - West Midlands bespoke software and website developers

You might remember I talked about writing a tagging engine for Chestnut that would form one of the core elements of product maintenance. Well today I am happy to announce that the tagging engine is now complete and we are a big step closer to releasing the first demo version of Chestnut.

The tagging engine has enabled us to truly open up Chestnut to some interesting possibilities when for product management and we see big things on the horizon for future updates to incorporate tagging elsewhere. In short, Chestnut is now capable of selling any number of varying types of product with varying attributes, all easily configurable by the Chestnut Administrator.

The Little Tree Team

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

Hello, and welcome to Little Tree Software’s new Web Site and Blog!

We are a small group of Software Engineers passionate about making good software. If you’d like to know more about our approach to Software Engineering see our ‘About Us’ page.

In the meantime we’re going to use our blog to update you on the status of Chestnut, our wonderful E-Commerce engine and talk about interesting aspects of design patterns, code and generally all things Software Engineering that we find impressive and useful.

So, lets talk about Chestnut. Currently a work in progress, Chestnut is going through some exciting development cycles to bring the best of tagging to E-Commerce. Our aim is to bring a little of that Web 2.0 magic into Chestnut were it’s best suited to benefit users with ease of use for powerful features such as search.

We plan to release a Chestnut Preview here on Little Tree in early January and to follow up with Chestnut Version 1.0 shortly after. If you would like to be notified of the Preview Release please complete our contact form and send us a message.

As a software house Little Tree also takes on software and web design work. If you would like to know more about our bespoke software and other services see ‘Our Services’ page.

Thanks for reading our first post, we hope to serve up our first Software Engineering post in the coming week. See you next time,

The Little Tree Team