You might have wondered at our blogs being a little silent. Well a lot has been happening behind the scenes. In the past several months our teams have been working on a host of ‘Infrastructure’ extensions that will add immense value and decrease development time for our extensions as well as custom projects.  

Infrastructure extensions are like Joomla’s core com_categories. Other extensions can use it without having to recreate the wheel. The below diagram should give you just a little bit of an idea as to what all is coming !

 

In this blog we shall be talking about one such extension - TJ Vendor. Techjoomla today already has several extensions like Quick2Cart, JGive, JTicketing that support a multi vendor mode. Soon Shika will have the same functionality. The core of the multi vendor system that supports Vendor Management, Fees management, Payouts to name a few have been abstracted into a reusable extension.

TJ Vendor shall offer the following as infrastructure to other extensions to support it. Not everything will be there in the initial versions but with future updates we will be rolling out updates that will help all extensions that use it.

  1. Managing Vendor information centrally
  2. Ability to configure fees specific to a vendor in the X$+Y% format
  3. Tj Fields Integration
    1. Address field represented as Map
  4. Vendor specific storage of information - Some of these will come in future versions
    1. Payment Gateway configuration
    2. Shipping Configurations
    3. Defining which countries to sell in
    4. Vendor Level coupon management
    5. Invoice Manager / Invoice templates
    6. Email management
    7. Certificate Manager
    8. Role Based ACL & Sub Users
  5. Centralised Payout management
  6. Payment Dues storage which can be overall or client (extension specific)

The beauty of this approach is that extensions can use it by simply passing a client in the URL like the Joomla category management & the extension will store all data in the right context. So all our extensions will get menus in the back end to Manage Vendors, Payouts, Fees etc. inside their own menus but will actually be managed by a central system.

This will also allow you, if you want to do single payouts even if you are using all our Multi vendor extensions !

Do comment and let us know your thoughts on this approach !