Fortnightly update #1
Ok, I am going to start pushing out fortnightly updates to keep you up to date with the progress of Associates Niche Store.
The past few weeks have seen me spend about 6 hours a day coding, that’s a lot of time when I also have a full-time job.
I will be taking a two day break this weekend to relax and gather thought’s about what’s to develop on the script.
So, here are just a few things which I have added/fixed or changed to the script:
- Added caching of Amazon XML data – This can be turned on or off and cache will last for one hour. I have seen great speed improvements with this, there’s no real reason to switch it off so I may choose to have it enabled by default.
- Enabled http compression – Enabling this is amazing, instant noticable results. Pages load up to 4x quicker than with no compression.
- Added “tracking” – I can’t really expose any more details just yet as we want to keep some features secret before launch!
- Ajax shopping cart fully completed.
- Custom reviews feature added. Also some great tricks added to make Amazon reviews more useful.
- MySQL database query caching functions added.
- Work begun on ANS backend “admin area” – This is about 50% complete, many more configurable options still need to be added. No support for non US stores will be available just yet.
- Fully completed Amazon Product API signed request updates.
What’s left and when will it be released!??!
The dev code is from today feature frozen. I will only be finishing/expanding existing features. Main areas of development left are theming, backend, installer and error handling.
Although as previously stated I said I was about 80% completed before general release, the remaining 20% of development could take me a further 2-3 months. Further updates will hopefully give you a more acurate time.
Back to work, and you will hear from me in another fortnight!
