Andy Butland

Rather off topic for me on this blog but thought interesting nonetheless to publish... I was taken following the personally rather disappointing UK election results by a comment by the Green MP Caroline Lucas reported in the Guardian . Reflecting on the result, she is quoted as saying... The system is wrong and we should have electoral reform, but that could be some time coming. So we need other ways to work together in a progressive alliance. Where it is appropriate, only one progressive candidate could stand in a seat – a sort of electoral pact... Which got me interested in the numbers, in particular considering what the change in the result might have been if such a pact was in place for 2015. Clearly there's a lot of assumption in this - not least the fact that I'm using the hindsight of the actual results to determine what might have been different, which is rather circular. It also assumes that every voter that would have voted say Liberal Democrat would be happy

For a while now, since last Codegarden in 2014 in fact, I've been planning to take a look at Merchello , an e-commerce framework for Umbraco . In the past I've made use of uCommerce which worked well for the project but the fact that, like Umbraco, Merchello is open-source is one factor that makes it attractive to consider for future projects. So on and off for the past few weeks I've built out a very basic store site. Really doesn't look like much and has little in the way of bells and whistles, but implements a number of the core features required for an e-commerce website, namely: Product category and product pages Products with variants, with price and availability indicated for the particular variant selected Basket page with quantity update and option to remove Billing and shipping detail collection Delivery method selection and application of postage & packing costs Selection of payment method Integration with a credit card processing provider, A