Client's background:

Datgel has been providing specialist software, advice, training, and support to geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering firms worldwide for more than 11 years.
They cater to all budgets with packaged software options and software development in .NET. Their investment in R&D over many years shows through in a full suite of mature, ready-to-use software products for field data entry, laboratory, data analysis, reporting, 2D and 3D modeling, and web-based data sharing.

Datgel had a custom version or nopCommerce 1.9 when we started to work with this company. They added some additional domain models like licence, licence type, location, region, organization, organization type, site, downloads, etc to simplify the working process with their customers and our main tasks were:

• to upgrade their website
• to implement their custom logic as plugins/fix issues and add new features.
• to use Azure Blob Storage for downloads.
• to migrate their asp.net webpages pages to CMS system so that a non-developer can edit all content.

We had two types of difficulties during this project:

• import of asp.net webforms pages to our CMS. We had to convert such asp.net webforms elements, for example, loginview which allows showing different content for different users. So we had to implement some sort of engine which allows to use controls in text, and we added macros to our CMS plugin to support these features. Also we implemented some macroses to support the logic of asp.net webforms controls which were used.
• import of their old DB structure to a new structure. nopCommerce changed a lot of their DB structure from nop 1.9 and customers had a lot of their own tables changes, so we had to create a new table structure to store their data independent from nopCommerce data and also we wrote SQL scripts which moved not only nop data to nop 3.8 but also their own data to a new table structure.

We upgraded their website from version 1.9 till 3.8. Also, we implemented their requested features from the scratch. We did it because of the differences in technologies. nopCommerce 1.9 used webforms platform and since version 2.0 nopCommerce uses Asp.Net MVC. Also, we created templates for different types of content pages and imported their asp.net webforms pages to our CMS.

• ~1400 products were moved to a new DB and to a new structure.
• ~160 pages were migrated from asp.net webforms to our CMS plugin
• ~2000 customers were moved

We had developed their design based on our Unify theme. This theme supports responsive design for mobile devices.
CMS plugin allows storing and modifying content by using nopCommerce Admin interface
new version of nopCommerce gave also add a lot of benefits for modifying and managing content

Techniques:

C#, TSQL, CSS, SAAS, JS

Platform:

nopCommerce, Azure