Here is an interesting presentation from the Plone 2010 conference in Bristol (in English).
It presents a particularly relevant approach to making a high-level CMS (Plone) coexist with an e-commerce system (here Django lfs).
Rather than grafting e-commerce extension modules onto a Plone site, the author sets out his vision of e-commerce as a web service integrated into Plone. The main idea behind this concept is to get the best out of each system: Plone is excellent for publishing and sharing information, while lfs is perfect for managing customer orders and product sheets.
For the visitor, everything is completely transparent: with the use of xdv, they have the impression of always being on the same site, and can easily navigate between the two.
For the company, the benefit is twofold:
1. It can offer visitors a high-level service by combining the strength of the Plone CMS to distribute information (for example, publishing assembly instructions or sharing information via an extranet) and the efficiency of lfs.
2. Because the architectures are less intertwined with one another, future developments become much simpler: migrating from one version of Plone to another becomes child’s play, for example.
A very fine demonstration…