The road to Oscar 1.0

Oscar 0.7 was released this week, a comparatively minor house-keeping release that allowed us to reduce our pull-request and issue backlogs. We have a plan for Oscar through 2014 and this article outlines the roadmap.

v1.0

We’re aiming to be v1.0 before the end of the year¹. Oscar has been beta for nearly two years and its APIs are stabilising. We’re ready to commit to the backward compatibility responsibilities associated with coming out of beta.

Plus, this will help Tangent Snowball (who sponsor Oscar’s development) promote Oscar to blue-chip or “enterprise” clients, who feel nervous enough using open-source e-commerce software, let alone beta open-source software.

There isn’t a lot to do before this milestone. Oscar’s philosophy is to keep the core package lean and flexible, hence we don’t have a large shopping list of features we want to add. Rather, there are a few areas that need careful review to ensure they are flexible enough. Also, there are a few topics that we want to research thoroughly in case they have design implications.

These are detailed here:

Product dashboard

The current version uses a one-size-fits-all approach which is now stretched to breaking point trying to handle a wide range of scenarios. In particular, it’s not easy to administer group and variant products using the current implementation².

A new, carefully considered version will be built that provides separate views and forms for the different work-flows. The new implementation will be simpler than the current, provide a superior user experience and be easier to customise and extend.

This piece of work is scheduled to be looked at by Tangent’s UX team shortly and should land in master over the summer.

Multi-tenancy

We’re aiming to provide better support for multi-tenanted sites where a single dashboard is used to manage a product catalogue that can be used across several sites. Several people on the mailing list have requested this, and Tangent have a forthcoming project that will require a form of this.

This poses some tricky design questions around how products, categories and offers are linked to sites. It’s tempting to slap a new many-to-many relationship onto every core model that links them to sites, but this may not be the right approach as it will add extra joins to SQL queries. Some careful research is required: we don’t want to impair performance for the many to satisfy the requirements of the few.

We’ll be talking to several people at DjangoCon EU 2014 about how Tangent can partner with other Oscar implementors to first design the appropriate handling, and later drive forward an implementation.

Faceted browsing everywhere

Oscar uses Haystack for search (with a preference for Solr) and has some custom helpers to make working with facets easier. Facets are great for customers whenever they’re browsing a list of products and it’s desirable to allow faceting on all product browsing views. This would require using the search back-end to drive all browsing views.

Some initial work has been done on this already. We intend to review and merge this into master soon.

Research topics

Some things to look into:

• Oscar ships with a set of translation message files but doesn’t currently provide built-in support for translating model content into multiple languages. There are various Django libraries that address this issue already. We need to research the best approach (or approaches) and document how to use them with Oscar.
• Since Oscar is just a set of apps, it works with all existing Django CMS packages. However, more research is required to find the right way to integrate content management. With its “promotions” app, Oscar already provides some limited forms of merchandising but it might be better to drop this app and provide better hooks for CMS packages to manage all content. We’ll see.

Thanks

As ever, we’re hugely grateful to the work of the community: submitting pull requests, adding translations, reporting bugs.

If you’d like to get involved, please see our contributing guidelines.