I am going to do a quick overview for each tab/feature currently on Tienda 0.3.1 released on March 22nd, 2010. Tienda 0.4 Beta was released today, March 31st.
Very smooth and it adds a Tienda Dashboard quick icon to your Joomla! control panel immediately after installation is complete.
The dashboard is customizable so you can add or remove modules to create the perfect overview of the store's administration reports as needed.
This tab is where the main information about the store will reside. From the store's basic information to image folder settings to currency units. This is the main hub for the store settings.
On this tab you have subsections such as currencies accepted, Countries, Zones, Geo Zones, Order States, Tax Classes and Shipping methods. This is where you find Tienda's meat.
Tienda already comes with 239 pre-set countries and you can easily add a more obscure country not listed.
One of the main features of Tienda is the ability to set up Zones and Geo Zones that will interact with the store's settings in order to perform tax and shipping calculations. Zones correspond to the States/Provinces within the countries. Geo Zones are a step up in defining tax or shipping rates based on a group of Zones. For example: If a seller has a taxable product where taxes are only applied if sold to a buyer within the same state, you would create 2 Geo Zones: the first including only the seller's state and the second including all of the other states. Once the Geo Zones are created you can then add Tax Classes based on the existing Geo Zones therefore setting the tax percentage to be applied to purchases within the seller's state and 0.00% for the second Geo Zone (all of the other states).
Shipping methods are defined by Tax Class and therefore tied to the Geo Zones as well. Dioscouri is working on tying Tienda to automated shipping calculations.
The simplicity of this process is just beautiful. One neat thing about adding items throughout Tienda is the Save + New button. It allows you to quickly add items without having to go back to the dashboard.
Simple UI to allow the addition of multiple manufacturers which will in turn be listed in the product configuration.
Another simple UI to add Categories. The same form layout used throughout Tienda. There is no limit to the number of nested categories you can add.
Once you have your Manufacturers and Categories added (if your store needs them) you can then add the products. You will see the same simple UI where you can add products using the Save+New button which speeds up the process by skipping going back to the dashboard or the main product tab to click on the New button again. The ability to clone existing products listings is already on the road map.
The users tab is tied to the core's user management so there is no duplicate user records. Tienda also has a a system plugin that, if you enable it, will override the core user component to enable guest checkouts.
This is a simple overview of all the orders placed and they can be filtered by ID, date, customer, total price and state. It's a very handy tab.
Tienda has conversion tools (plugins) to allow for painlessly converting from other well known carts.
In resume, Tienda seems very easy to use and robust at the same time. The roadmap is moving at lightning speed and very soon we will have the Community version stable available for download. Lots of good feature requests were added to the roadmap after the Toronto presentation including a better support for compound taxes and the ability to assign Geo Zones to products (not just categories) and Dioscouri's willingness to listen to all users' feature requests and ideas makes for a hit extension from the get go.
I will be watching it closely and for those who would like to be a part of the project, Dioscouri has opened its projects site to anybody wanting to help with development, testing, and translation. You can take a look at the development progress and help by posting new found bugs or requesting new features. See you all there!
*Note: Presentation venue was sponsored by Abivia.
