Cartridge 0.10.0

A Django shopping cart application.

Created by Stephen McDonald

Overview

Cartridge is a shopping cart application built using the Django framework. It is BSD licensed, and designed to provide a clean and simple base for developing e-commerce websites. It purposely does not include every conceivable feature of an e-commerce website; instead, Cartridge focuses on providing core features common to most e-commerce websites.

This specific focus stems from the idea that every e-commerce website is different, is tailored to the particular business and products at hand, and should therefore be as easy to customize as possible. Cartridge achieves this goal with a code-base that is as simple as possible and implements only the core features of an e-commerce website.

Cartridge extends the Mezzanine content management platform. A live demo of Cartridge can be found by visiting the Mezzanine live demo.

Features

• Hierarchical categories

• Easily configurable product options (colours, sizes, etc.)

• Hooks for tax/shipping calculations and payment gateways

• Sale pricing

• Promotional discount codes

• PDF invoice generation (for packing slips)

• Stock control

• Product popularity

• Thumbnail generation

• Built-in test suite

• Separation of presentation (no embedded markup)

• Smart categories (by price range, colour, etc)

• Registered or anonymous checkout

• Configurable number of checkout steps

• Denormalised data for accessiblilty and performance

• Authenticated customer accounts with transaction history

Dependencies

Cartridge is designed as a plugin for the Mezzanine content management platform, and therefore requires Mezzanine to be installed. The integration of the two applications should occur automatically by following the installation instructions below.

Installation

The easiest method is to install directly from PyPI using pip by running the command below, which will also install the required dependencies mentioned above:

$ pip install -U cartridge

Otherwise, you can download Cartridge and install it directly from source:

$ python setup.py install

Once installed, the command mezzanine-project can be used to create a new Mezzanine project, with Cartridge installed, in similar fashion to django-admin.py:

$ mezzanine-project -a cartridge project_name
$ cd project_name
$ python manage.py createdb --noinput
$ python manage.py runserver

Here we specify the -a switch for the mezzanine-project command, which tells it to use an alternative package (cartridge) for the project template to use. Both Mezzanine and Cartridge contain a project template package containing the settings.py and urls.py modules for an initial project. If you’d like to add Cartridge to an existing Mezzanine or Django project, you’ll need to manually configure these yourself. See the FAQ section of the Mezzanine documentation for more information.

Note

The createdb is a shortcut for using Django’s syncdb command and setting the initial migration state for South. You can alternatively use syncdb and migrate if preferred. South is automatically added to INSTALLED_APPS if the USE_SOUTH setting is set to True.

createdb will also install some demo content, such as a contact form, image gallery and your shop’s first product. If you’d like to omit this step, use the --nodata option with createdb.

You should then be able to browse to http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/ and log in using the default account (username: admin, password: default). If you’d like to specify a different username and password during set up, simply exclude the --noinput option included above when running createdb.

Contributing

Cartridge is an open source project managed using both the Git and Mercurial version control systems. These repositories are hosted on both GitHub and Bitbucket respectively, so contributing is as easy as forking the project on either of these sites and committing back your enhancements.

Please note the following guidelines for contributing:

• Contributed code must be written in the existing style. For Python (and to a decent extent, JavaScript as well), this is as simple as following the Django coding style and (most importantly) PEP 8. Front-end CSS should adhere to the Bootstrap CSS guidelines.

• Contributions must be available on a separately named branch based on the latest version of the main branch.

• Run the tests before committing your changes. If your changes cause the tests to break, they won’t be accepted.

• If you are adding new functionality, you must include basic tests and documentation.

Here’s a quick start to hacking on Cartridge after forking it on GitHub, by using the internal “project_template” as your current project:

$ git clone https://github.com/your-github-username/cartridge/
$ cd cartridge
$ git checkout -b your-new-branch-name
$ cp cartridge/project_template/local_settings.py{.template,}
$ python setup.py develop
$ python cartridge/project_template/manage.py createdb --noinput
$ python cartridge/project_template/manage.py runserver

"hack hack hack"

$ python setup.py test
$ git commit -am "A message describing what you changed."
$ git push origin your-new-branch-name

Note

Cartridge’s development branch often relies on features that exist in Mezzanine’s development branch, but haven’t yet made it into an official release. To install Mezzanine’s development version in your environment, run:

$ pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/stephenmcd/mezzanine.git#egg=Mezzanine

Language Translations

Cartridge makes full use of translation strings, which allow Cartridge to be translated into multiple languages using Django’s internationalization methodology. Translations are managed on the Transiflex website but can also be submitted via GitHub or Bitbucket. Consult the documentation for Django’s internationalization methodology for more information on creating translations and using them.

Third-party Modules

The following modules have been developed outside of Cartridge. If you have developed a module to integrate with Mezzanine or Cartridge, and would like it listed in the documentation, send an email to the mezzanine-users mailing list. You can also add modules to the Mezzanine Grid on djangopackages.com.

• cartridge_braintree - Payment processor for Braintree.

• cartridge-external-payment - Allows payment on an external provider platform.

• cartridge-tax - Implements a handful of sales tax models.

• cartridge-stripe - Alternative payment backend for Stripe.

• cartridge-pinpayments - PIN payments integration.

Donating

If you would like to make a donation to continue development of Cartridge, you can do so via the Mezzanine Project website.

Support

To report a security issue, please send an email privately to [e-mail]. This gives us a chance to fix the issue and create an official release prior to the issue being made public.

For all other Cartridge support, the primary channel is the mezzanine-users mailing list. Questions, comments, and all related discussions take place here amongst knowledgeable members of the community.

If you’re certain you’ve come across a bug, then please use the GitHub issue tracker. It’s crucial that enough information is provided to reproduce the bug. This includes things such as the Python stack trace generated by error pages, as well as other aspects of the development environment used, such as operating system, database, Python version, etc. If you’re not sure you’ve found a reproducable bug, then please try the mailing list first.

Finally, feel free to drop by the #mezzanine IRC channel on Freenode, for a chat!

Communications in all Cartridge and Mezzanine spaces are expected to conform to the Django Code of Conduct.

Sites Using Cartridge

• Ripe Maternity

• Cotton On

• Coopers Store

• Sheer Ethic

• tindie.com

• Ross A. Laird

• Pink Twig

• Parfume Planet

• Life is Good

• Brooklyn Navy Yard

• Cotton On Asia

• Manai Glitter

• Tactical Bags

• Charles Koll Jewelry

• Puraforce Remedies

• Adrenaline

• The Peculiar Store

• KisanHub

• Kegbot

• Amblitec

• ZigZag Bags

• Justine & Katie’s Bowtique

• The Art Rebellion

• Engineered Arts

• Lipman Art

• ZHackers

• Potrillo al Pie

• You Name It