Lightning Fast Shop (LFS) - Kai Diefenbach¶

Tags: django, djangocon

LFS has over 100k downloads in 2.5 years. It is BSD licensed, so do with it whatever you want. 170+ members on the mailinglist. And there are 50 forks on github. And there are at least 40 known shops that use it (there have to be many more).

Because of the special needs, LFS has a custom admin interface.

Most items are grouped into categories for easy browsing. Arbitrary nestable. Products can be default products (“pony”); variant products (“blue pony”, “pink pony”) where you overwrite certain fieds; configurable products (something that consists of several subcomponents that you need to configure, like kind of harddisk or amount of memory).

The products can have properties. You can use them to create variants and configurable products.

Of course there are various payment processors you can use. It is quite flexible and you can add rules like “don’t accept a credit card below 20 Euro”. He showed a couple of screenshot on how it works and looks. (Pretty nice and clean layout, btw)

Marketing is important, so you can have vouchers for discounts. And “topsellers” to push projects to the top of the list. Customer interaction? Ratings.

Optimizing for search engines is done with an automatic sitemap, flat urls, well-formed and descriptive urls. Ready for google analytics. Option for meta keywords.

To create your actual web pages, you can use actions (lists of actions like ‘login’), portlets (sidebar items) and page blocks.

On to development. LFS is now on github at https://github.com/diefenbach/django-lfs . You can propose features there. New features now need tests and documentation. Migrations are handled by south. Deprecation happens over two releases.

A main focus for the future: keep it extensible and adaptable. One of the things to get that working is to put even more work into the existing APIs.

Current version in development is 0.8, which has django 1.4 support. They will sprint on it after the conference!