ECMS Module
From NewHaven Software Wiki
Connecting CMS to Your Website(s)
CMS’s optional eCMS module is used to connect CMS to the website(s) of your choice. eCMS uses “Plug-ins” to support specific carts. Plug-ins are available from NewHaven Software (one comes with your purchase of the eCMS module) or we can provide API documentation if you’d like to write your own.
The eCMS module provides a single and simple interface in which you can control and schedule the communications between CMS and your sites. Here is a list of the high level capabilities of the eCMS module. Additional capabilities of the Magento Plug-in are covered later in this article.
- Settings - CMS can store login credentials and assorted settings to facilitate communication directly between CMS and your cart.
- Order Downloads - CMS can connect to the web service hosted with your cart to download orders directly into CMS’s database.
Download Confirmations - CMS will communicate a list of successfully downloaded orders to the cart so the orders are flagged as downloaded (for carts that support this). Regardless, controls are in place in CMS to protect against processing of duplicate orders. Status window is displayed during site communications to show the progress of each action and notify you of any processing or connection errors. Even for large amounts of data, this view is scrollable and exportable. Text effects like colors and bold are used to help attract attention to processing exceptions and more noteworthy events.
- Product Uploads - Product information including product code/sku, pricing, descriptions, size/color attribute options, active/discontinued status, and stock levels. This includes both the creation of new products as well as updating existing. In this way you can use CMS to be the master product list for all channels although some cart specific information, such as categories and images, will need to be maintained in each cart. This upload system prevents the need to dual enter product information both in CMS and on your site(s).
- Order Status Uploads - Updating the cart with information about status changes to the order including tracking numbers for shipments.
- Catalog Requests - If you accept requests for a physical catalog on your site, these can be imported into CMS as part of the eCMS communications. Once imported they flow into CMS’s robust catalog fulfillment system making the management of mailing catalogs a breeze.
- Scheduling - You can configure CMS to automatically connect to your carts at the interval of your choosing (in minutes.) You can set this connection interval both for order downloads and a separate interval for product/inventory uploads.
- Timeout controls - You can tell CMS how long to wait for a response from your site before it reports it is non-responsive and times out.
- Products Assignments to Stores - You can choose which of your products should be available online and, if you are running multiple stores, which stores the product should appear on.
