AllStarWatch.com is our latest, complete e-commerce site. This project was interesting to say the least, its often a good learning experience to be thrown into a fire, even if you get a little burned.

For this project (which will remain under constant monitoring and development) we were tasked to develop an e-commerce site in one week's time. That's three days for initial development and four days for testing and implementation. And this was no vanilla website project, we were using the latest build of Joomla! CMS whose 1.5.x platform is still quite new as well as the latest platform of VirtueMart. We also had to tweak the store links and SEO with a third-party solution, install and test a new SSL certificate from Comodo, and offer payment gateways for credit cards (Authorize.Net) and PayPal. After multiple platform, cross browser testing, and order submission / fulfillment tests, we had to submit the site to a few search engines and a product feed to Froogle / GoogleBase. The final step was completed about an hour ago. Somewhere in the mix we had to convert a product database of nearly a thousand products and upload it (descriptions, images, prices and all) to the store.

Besides the hectic pace and unrealistic time schedule we foolishly agreed upon for this project, things became even more chaotic when the complete site was scrapped and re-created on day 2. We have been using VirtueMart 1.0.x for some time and have been testing the beta builds of 1.1, but until 1.1 was called stable by the developers we were not prepared to use it on a customer's live site. But into day 2 of development, the much anticipated and often delayed stable release of VirtueMart 1.1 was released and we decided for the long term viability of the site it was best to switch over to the latest build now rather than later. So the first two days of server/site development was scrapped, but at least we had the basics of our design and logo done.

I won't bore you with all the details of the developments past day 2, but let's just say like all installations of Open Source software, our use of Jooma/VirtueMart required some modification and tweaking. And like any relatively new product (which both Joomla 1.5.x and VirtueMart 1.1.x are) there were some things that didn't seem to work right (or at least as we thought they should) out of the box. But we're there now, and we made our deadline. In one week we have published an e-commerce site with fresh CMS and shopping cart software, secured by SSL and connected to two payment gateways with approximately 1000 products and search engine friendly URLs.

What's next.

Visit AllStarWatch.com - Licensed logo watches from your favorite team. NFL, MLB, NHL, NASCAR, NBA, WWE, U.S. Military and more!