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.