XpressEngine - Opensource CMS

Meet XE Shop!

2012-10-29T08:15:47-07:00

During the last few months we've been busy working on a whole new XE module for building e-commerce websites - XE Shop!.

Here's a quick rundown of its features:

Shop catalog

- categories, subcategories , products and custom attributes

- configurable products with variants (associated products)

- discount price for each product

- discount by total cart amount

- inventory and stock

- VAT and totals per cart and order

- list view and grid view

- export / import products(with categories and custom attributes)

Customers

- uses member entity that is already used in XE

- newsletter subscription from frontend

- send newsletters from shop backend

- manage customer addresses from both frontend and backend

Orders

- orders are created from a cart when the checkout process is finalized

- manage order statuses from backend

- minimum order amount

- you can checkout as a guest and also as a logged in member

- option in backend to order products out of stock

Payment and shipping

Multiple payment methods:

- Authorize.net AIM (credit card payment)

- Paypal Express Checkout (from paypal account)

- Paypal Payment Standard(credit card payment)

- Cash on delivery (basic payment method)

Flat rate shipping that has customizable price

Payment and shipping methods are built as a pluggable system so anyone can create a payment or shipping gateway and upload it

Statistics

Dashboard statistics contain information about:

- last 5 orders

- most 5 ordered products

- top buying customers

- lifetime sales

- visitor statistics

- summary of shop (orders and order statuses)

If we got you even a little bit excited, go ahead and download XE Shop or browse the documentation!

XE Demo site re-launched

2012-07-12T07:52:57-07:00

One of the best ways to get to know a product is to test in hands-on. Until now, XpressEngine Demo site showcased just XE Core. But starting today you can see XE Textyle, Board, Forum, Wiki and Maps in action!

Go to the demo page: http://www.xpressengine.org/demo.

We also added step by step tutorials for these modules, to help you get up and running on your own machine.

Tell us what you think in the comments!

XE-Instant

2012-06-14T23:28:45-07:00

Introduction

Because we always want to make the life of our users easier we come up with another tool: XE-Instant.

What is this tool and how can it help you? Basically this tool allows you to deploy the latest version of XE directly in the cloud within minutes.

Maybe for some of you the last sentence was not very clear (deploy, cloud). Don’t worry. We will explain everything in the next paragraphs.

Let’s assume you want to use XE to build your own site, even if it’s a blog, a forum, a shop, a community site or whatever you would like to do. This process can be divided in 2 steps:

Hosting related issues
Creating the actual content of the site

This tool will help you to easily solve the first step. So instead of thinking how you can possibly:

host your new site somewhere on the web
choose a hosting company
make the setup there (web server, PHP, DB, configurations)
obtain a public IP address and add the entries in the DNS
obtain the latest version of XE and put it in the right place

you can use this tool and solve all of these problems very easy. Just follow the steps provided in this tutorial.

We have mentioned earlier about the cloud (actually the short for cloud computing). So what is a cloud?

The Wikipedia entry for cloud computing states:

Cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing and storage capacity as a service to a heterogeneous community of end-recipients. The name comes from the use of clouds as an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams.

So it’s an abstract place where you can store different things and benefit of virtual machines with no up-front costs. You pay only for what you use. If you want to use a Linux machine for 2 hours you will pay only for that (around 0.093$). You can start and stop any number of virtual machine whenever you want.

There are several companies that offer cloud computing services like Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), Google (Cloud).

In this first version of this tool we only offer support for AWS (others will be added later).

Update: a second part of this tutorial is available. You can check here: http://www.xpressengine.org/blog/entry/xe-instant-part-2

Prerequisites

Step 1: Install JAVA

This tool is a java based tool so you need to have a recent version of JAVA installed on your machine (either JDK or JRE).

Step 2: Create an AWS account

Amazon Web Services are a set of services providing different functionalities. The ones we are interested in are EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and Route53 (for DNS).

Since we will use Amazon Web Services you will need to create an account. That’s very easy (following few simple steps). You can start here(by following the Sign up Now button).

Remark: one of the benefits of using AWS is that new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year. You can find more details here. Yeah, that’s true: so you will be able to host your XE based site for one year free.

You’re probably wondering what happens after a year. Well after a year that EC2 Micro Instance will cost you about 128$ per year (hosted in US – west coast – Oregon) with an upfront for 1 year. You can find the complete list of AWS prices (after one year) here.

Download and Run

Step 3: Download and run the XE-Instant tool

You can download the tool from here on your desktop or any other folder of your choice. The tool is Java based so it can run on any platform (Windows, Linux, and Mac).

Now open a new command line or console and navigate (using cd – change directory command) to the folder where you have saved the tool.

In order to proceed with the next steps you will need two identifiers of your new created AWS account: Access Key and Secret Key. These two values can be found in the Security Credentials area of your AWS account.

Step 4: Create a new AWS EC2 instance

Type in the command line / console the following line (replace Your_AWS_Access_Key and Your_AWS_Secret_Key with the ones corresponding to your AWS account):

java -jar instant-xe.jar setup-aws create_instance access-key "Your_AWS_Access_Key" secret-key "Your_AWS_Secret_Key" endpoint "https://ec2.us-west-2.amazonaws.com"

Note 1: a new file called instant-xe.pem was created in the current folder (in case a filename with the same name already exists in the same folder it will not overwrite it but create a new file in the temporary folder of the system). You should store this file in a safe place and never send it to anyone (it’s like the PIN code from your credit card). This file contains the private key to log in on the machine (using SSH protocol). If you lose it, you will never be able to log in on that machine anymore! (Basically if you are not an advanced user you won’t have to log in on that machine at all, but you never know so it’s better safe than sorry).

Note 2: running this command will output the public DNS of the machine and an IP address that was assigned to it. You should save these two values (Basically if you are not an advanced user you will not use these values, but just in case)

Step 5: Assign an elastic IP (optional)

Type in the command line / console the following line (replace Your_AWS_Access_Key and Your_AWS_Secret_Key with the ones corresponding to your AWS account):

java -jar instant-xe.jar setup-aws assign_address access-key "Your_AWS_Access_Key" secret-key "Your_AWS_SECRET_KEY" endpoint "https://ec2.us-west-2.amazonaws.com"

Note 1: this step is optional because assigning an elastic IP to your new created machine is not vital. The machine has already a public IP assigned (once it was created). The problem is that in case you ever want to restart it, the IP address will not be preserved (a new one will be assigned at each reboot) unless you assign it an elastic IP. Not preserving the IP address means that each time it is modified you will have to reconfigure your host and wait for DNS changes to be propagated to all your customers. We recommend doing this step if you are not an advanced user.

Note 2: this will output a new IP address that will be allocated to your machine. You should save this as it may be useful at some point in the future.

Step 6: Associate domain name (optional)

Type in the command line / console the following lines (replace Your_AWS_Access_Key and Your_AWS_Secret_Key with the ones corresponding to your AWS account, Your_Base_Domain with the name of your domain – see more details above):

java -jar instant-xe.jar setup-aws associate_domain access-key "Your_AWS_Access_Key" secret-key "Your_AWS_SECRET_KEY" endpoint "https://ec2.us-west-2.amazonaws.com" domain-name Your_Base_Domain

java -jar instant-xe.jar setup-aws associate_domain access-key "Your_AWS_Access_Key" secret-key "Your_AWS_SECRET_KEY" endpoint "https://ec2.us-west-2.amazonaws.com" domain-name www.Your_Base_Domain

Example of Your_Base_Domain:

Let’s say you want the name of your site to be www.myxesite.com
Then the corresponding base domain for it is myxesite.com

We assume that you have already bought the domain you want to use.

Note 1: this is optional because you may want to keep the DNS in some other place or in an extreme case you may want to access your machine only by the IP. We recommend doing this step if you are not an advanced user.

Note 2: when executing the above two commands you will notice that the tool prints each time two records: the NS and the SOA records. These records should be saved and forwarded to the company where you have bought your domain from to make the corresponding changes (they will know what to do exactly with them). When the changes are reflected you can go on with the next steps (this may take a while).

Step 7: Make the XE setup

Type in the command line / console the following lines (replace Your_Base_Domain with the name of your domain – see more details above):

java -jar instant-xe.jar deploy-xe hostname Your_Base_Domain private-key-file instant-xe.pem domain-name Your_Base_Domain

If you have done previous two steps (5 and 6) you should use the above line as it is (just replace all the occurrences of Your_Base_Domain as in the previous example). However if you did not followed step 6 you should remove the last part (domain-name Your_Base_Domain) and replace the first occurrence of Your_Base_Domain with the IP address generated at step 5. If step 5 was also skipped you should use directly the IP obtained at step 4.

Note 1: when executing the above command the script will output the new randomly generated password for MySQL. You should save it someplace safe (you will also need it in the next step).

Step 8: Proceed with XE installation

Open up a browser and navigate to address of your new web site. This can be:

Something like www.myxesite.com (if you associated a domain name)
IP address that was obtained in previous steps

During the XE installation, when you are asked about the details regarding the database to use you should choose for:

MySQL as database engine type
Database name to use is xe
Database username xeuser
Database pwd - the one obtained at previous step

That’s pretty much it! Once you’ve completed the XE installation steps (basically by following the next button) you can start using it and add the content you wish.

The new XE instance that was created has mod rewrite enabled which means that you can have friendly URL(s) in your site.

Additional Available Commands and Options

deploy-xe command

Additional parameters:

o username – by default the tool tries to connect to the machine (via SSH) using the private key file that you have obtained at step 4 and authenticate as ec2-user. If you want to specify a different username you can use this parameter (recommended only for advanced users)

o xe-core-download-url – by default this tool uses the latest stable version of XE Core available for download on www.xpressengine.org/download. If for some reasons you will want to use a different version of XE you can use this parameter to specify the download URL of that alternative version.

Setup-aws command

Additional sub-commands:

o delete_instance

You can use this command in order to permanently delete the machine that you own in the cloud. You must be careful using this command as this operation cannot be reversible and you will lose any data or content you have created on the XE instance. Once performed, you will not be charged any more by AWS.

Important: before using this command please first use remove_domain and after that remove_address commands. You will see below the description for each of them.