Month: September 2011

nopcommerce 2.0 fresh install sql script

With one of our NopCommerce ecommerce websites, we recently ran into an issue with upgrading – in short, if you want to upgrade from a pre-2.0 site to the latest (2.1 as of now) version, you would need to install 2.0 first, let it create a new database, run the 1.9 to 2.0 migration sql script, and *then* upgrade to 2.1. Since we still had a 1.7 site, and had developed a new version in 2.1, we wanted to skip the whole installation of 2.0 step. So, we ran a 2.0 version on a local machine, let it install a fresh db to a new database, and scripted this out to a new script. We can now run this script to create a fresh 2.0 db if needed.

If you have need of this script, you can download it here: nopcommerce 2.0 new database script.

(this is for sql 2008 r2, it might work on your non 2k8r2 db, but no guarantees).

schema.org with nopcommerce

We’re deploying the latest nopcommerce 2.1 on some of our ecommerce sites very soon. This version (well, version 2.0) was a major overhaul of the nopcommerce project to port it over to mvc3 and razor… so migrating our old sites over turned into a lot of work, but work (I hope) that will be worthwhile since the ASP.Net MVC framework is so… well, we’re big fans.

While messing around with porting the sites, I decided to dabble with adding some schema.org tags to the project. Right now it’s pretty proprietary to our own sites, but I’m planning to look into whether this can be created as an add-on for nopcommerce.

If you are unfamiliar with schema.org, it’s the latest greatest incarnation of microdata/rich snippets/whatever you call it… which just means, you add information mixed into your html pages which let’s third parties be able to extract meaning from the content of your page, beyound just a bunch of html. So, when we add this to a nopcommerce site, we can add markup inside the page to show what a “product” is… which means tagging the name, description, price, and so forth. The tags are a great mix of simplicity with usability, as it seems like all the most common things you can think of on the web are encompassed in the definition. And even if they aren’t, you can request an extension be added to the schema. Not too shabby. Have a look at http://www.schema.org for more info.

268435456

268435456 is a big number. I ran across it while researching some google maps stuff, and the author of an article said it was half the earth’s diameter, in pixels, when google maps is zoomed to level 21. OK…

For some reason, I wondered if that was kindof a common knowledge thing or not, so i googled that number. I found the referenced article, but then also found a bunch of references to some default memory size limitation set in PHP. Strange.

That is one really big number to have occurred in two distinct places like this. Which makes me wonder if it has any other significance. Actually, i bet it’s a power of 2.

Sure enough, it is 28 bits of data, or rather 2 ^ 28 = 268435456

Welp, not such a huge mystery now I guess.