Melbourne Umbracian Meetup - September 2015

Melbourne hosts a Umbraco meetup every first Tuesday of the month and the September meetup was a success with Peter Gregory (Little Web Empire trainer for the whole of Australasia) presenting his thoughts on E-commerce engines for Umbraco and his personal experiences with each. Attendance was great with around thirteen peeps joining in.

Peter discussed the following four E-commerce packages and his personal views on each of them (especially the ones he's used). Peter had some great slides which I'm sure will go up on his blog at some point (or you can see them here).

Commercial E-commerce packages:

1. Tea Commerce
2. uCommerce (There is a Free edition listed, but details on that are a little hazy).

Open Source packages

1. Merchello
2. uWebShop (latest version from November 2014?)

While writing this post, I came across this great blog post from Guy Macarthur (it's an year old though and some things have changed) which makes some interesting reading too.

During the meet-up and the now customary Pizza break, the following topics were discussed as well:

• uSync - For syncing umbraco database config to disk and back.
• uSiteBuilder - Vega’s uSitebuilder is an open source (LPGL) framework created for .NET developers to accelerate and streamline their Umbraco based development projects. (But there seems to be no updates since August 2011)
• Ditto - Ditto is a lightweight model mapper for Umbraco. It offers a generic solution to the problem of using strongly-typed models in your MVC views. There are no 3rd party dependencies, other than Umbraco core itself.
• Pete's cheat sheets - Covers dynamic published content and strongly typed published content  for MVC Templates, Partials, MacroPartials

E-commerce MVP (minimum viable product) was also another term which was discussed and the following resources talk about them in length.

• The ABCs of MVPs: How to get the RIGHT product out faster
• MVPs of Famous Companies

Interesting Trivia:
Wikipedia defines E-commerce (also written as e-Commerce, eCommerce or similar variants), short for electronic commerce, is trading in products or services using computer networks, such as the Internet.

Thanks to Robert Foster from Digitalsmith for organising this event and Adam Connor at roadhouse digital for providing the venue.

Hopefully we'll see you there in a future meetup...