Shopware booking portal of the Leuphana University of Lüneburg

Programming of a Shopware store for university course booking

At the beginning of 2021, Lüneburg's Leuphana University announced a funding project to program a booking portal for university study modules as part of the "Professional School Individuale" in order to simplify and promote continuing professional development. eWorks, as a web store agency, responded to this call for tenders with the concept of using existing standard eCommerce software as a technological basis and adapting it in such a way that it becomes a professional online store for university course booking. Although Leuphana University did not want to have an online store created in the narrower sense, this idea was nevertheless convincing due to the expected costs of this online store, because essential components such as product presentation and the checkout process did not have to be programmed from scratch. In the end, eWorks was awarded the contract for the implementation of this eCommerce project, which was mainly funded by grants.

After extensive consultation, Shopware 6 was selected as the standard eCommerce software for the store: although the use of Shopware version 6.0, which was still quite new at the time, involved technical risks, it anticipated the Shopware 6 migration that would be necessary later anyway. At the beginning there was the Shopware 6 installation, configuration and finally the customizing of Shopware 6. When setting up the online store, typical eCommerce terms such as "article number" or "shopping cart", which seemed confusing or inappropriate in the context of university courses, were replaced or removed. Following this customizing, the actual core competence of eWorks as a certified Shopware agency came into play: consulting & development of individual Shopware plugins with Shopware, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc. The client's technical requirements were recorded in dialog, designed, implemented, quality assured and integrated into the Shopware store. The creation and implementation of web design and on-site SEO were also handled by eWorks, so there was no need for a dedicated Shopware SEO agency (or other online store agencies): Leuphana University received everything from a single source from eWorks.

A technical highlight during the Shopware programming was the Shopware-Moodle connection via an importer, which reads data from the university's own "Moodle" learning platform via a web service, converts it, prepares it and finally creates it as a Shopware article in the booking portal or compares it with these. The Moodle export was provided by Leuphana University's IT department, while eWorks was responsible for implementing the Shopware importer: Moodle exports modules together with the associated course locations, Shopware imports these as articles and article variants - Moodle exports available locations, Shopware imports these as stock levels (and so on). In this way, the Moodle data model was partially mapped to the Shopware data model and the daily, fully automatic, bidirectional synchronization via this Moodle-Shopware interface synchronizes eLearning content on the one hand and store data on the other reliably and promptly. From a technical point of view, the Moodle eLearning system thus became the ERP system or merchandise management system (WaWi) of the Shopware store.

After the Shopware booking portal and Moodle integration had been created, Leuphana University wanted to have various convenience functions created for the new store: for example, in addition to the content-related course information, event dates were also to be imported into the Shopware store and displayed there, which was realized through a corresponding Shopware interface. Furthermore, eWorks was able to program a "dynamic calendar" that recognizes and visualizes course overlaps in the shopping cart at an early stage in order to avoid collisions. On top of this, a "waiting list" was implemented for those interested in courses, in case all course places are taken: if the daily Shopware data import reports free places again, the waiting list is processed fully automatically by an asynchronous background process ("cronjob") and each person on the waiting list receives an individual e-mail in strict chronological order with the chance to take part in the course or to be rejected - until all free places are finally allocated fairly. Last but not least, participation requirements had to be mapped in the booking portal: depending on the study module booked, specific personal data is requested during the booking process, uploads are accepted and used to determine admission.

After Shopware development, the booking portal went live at www.berufsbegleitende-weiterbildung.org in 2022. After this somewhat different internet store was opened, eWorks, as a Shopware e-commerce agency, accompanies its client and the booking portal as a technical contact and offers Shopware support in the event of any errors and operating issues, Shopware support, web design and general online store support and is always available to Leuphana University as a reliable Shopware partner.