Welcome

Social e-commerce. Selling products from your Joomla social site.

Welcome back to my Joomla ecommerce internet radio show. This is your host, Bob Bloom, in Toronto, Canada.

Today it is my pleasure to introduce you to our social site expert, Alice Grevet.

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Alice is an American ex-pat living in France. Bonjour, Alice!

News

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The big news this week is the release of Tienda's production beta.

It's free, and  it's MVC! Download it at Dioscouri.com.

They said months ago that they'd have an alpha version. They had an alpha version.

They said they'd release alpha upgrades sooner rather than later. They did.

They said they'd use an agile development tool, and up went their Redmine site.

They said that they'd release their production beta. They were a mere one day late.

Rafael, Vika, and the entire Tienda team: Bravo! Well Done!

This is verbatim from the Dioscouri site:

"Tienda is now an production beta, which means YES you may use it on live sites!  Be conscious that there are non-critical known bugs that we are working on.

We expect Tienda to be stable in Q2 2010, but honestly, that depends on how many of you report the minor bugs you find :-)".

Email Bag

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It's starting. The Tienda questions are starting. The theme is "Can Tienda do this? Can Tienda do that?". Tienda is a true MVC ecommerce extension. Just about everything is possible. Think big. Think strategic. Those things you wanted to do are now in the realm of possibilities.

Now, look, I know that Tienda is a bit thin on the feature set right now. But you mark my words, Tienda is going to be feature rich. Rafael has feature upgrades up his sleeve; plus, there are going to be plenty of third party toys coming.

You want to mess with the layouts? Go ahead. It's uber customizable now.

Your Joomla open source extension that is uber customizable is here.

Main

Alice, how are you?

How did you end up in France?

You are involved in the ex-pat community. What are you involved with?

You won an award?

You have your own social site, LetsBounceBack.com. Tell us about it.

What other social sites have you worked on?

These are all Joomla sites?

Do these sites currently, or will in the future, sell products?

How will you sell products on your Joomla social sites?

[Challenge to make money with social sites. With a true MVC cart, it's technologically feasible to start innovating.. to start integrating social extensions. Two ways: bring cart to the social site; and, integrate different streams into the social site (eg, email campaigns, help desk).. also use social site as a way for people to know about you and your products, to gain confidence to buy from you  -- as they need that set first...]

[stratifying users based on activity... Rafael showed something at the presentation that was intriguing: having an activity view of users... sales, forum posts...]

[with anahita/nooku, the technology is getting better to bring the cart into where your users are, instead of bringing your users into the cart.]

[For example, i have a client who sells a limited array of products. And one product dominates the sales. So the people who buy have their purchase of this product in common. People should be added post-purchase to a restricted social site that's not even viewable to the public. So you have a certain strata right there. The front page s/b a unified blog/landing page/checkout, along the lines of what Derek & I talked about on my earlier show "Coming in for a Landing Page".]

Closing

The Joomla Users Group of South Western Ontario had a meeting last week about css and email. Read about it at JUGSWO.com.

April meetings for the Toronto and SWO groups are not yet announced.

I once again urge you to check out your local Joomla group.

Alice, is there a Joomla Users Group where you are?

Alice, thanks for being here today.

Next Thursday Ian McClennan will join me to de-mystify the Joomla Project. See you then!