The company I worked for used AbleCommerce 2x for some time. In general, we
liked the product as it had most of the features clients want as well as
some fairly easy to customize "wizards."
We purchased the open source license with the 1 year subscription but the
folks over at Able seemed to get sidetracked with their auction product and
didn't release a major upgrade to AbleCommerce for over a year. They did,
however, release many minor upgrades and the tech support staff was
fantastic.
The open source license was helpful in a few cases, however, the code base
was immense (600+ templates), undocumented, and real spaghetti code. In
addition, the databases tables were not as normalized as we would have
liked. For the most part, it was better to leave the source code alone.
The administration interface was not something you could turn over to the
client. It was unintuitive and buggy (e.g. windows would pop open in the
wrong frame, ask for a login every time a link was clicked, etc.). That was
the biggest point of contention, actually, since we were looking to turn the
maintenance of the site over to the client.
Although AbleCommerce is billed as a consumer end product, it really takes a
ColdFusion programmer with at least a rudimentary skill set to install and
maintain AbleCommerce.
It looks like the new version has been updated some. This one only runs on
ColdFusion 4+, which is probably a good thing: much of the old code base
could have been simplified just by bringing it up to speed with the latest
versions of ColdFusion.
Unfortunately, it looks like the price has increased (or rather doesn't
decrease with the number of stores purchased). It's still affordable, but
there are quite a few other canned ColdFusion (and not ColdFusion for that
matter) shopping carts out there for much less money.
If your boss has already chosen AbleCommerce, though, I wouldn't worry too
much. Just try and stay out of the source as much as possible, and make use
the AbleCommerce support staff. They're a good bunch.
Benjamin S. Rogers
Web Developer, c4.net
voice: (508) 240-0051
fax: (508) 240-0057
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Homa [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 12:14 PM
To: CF-Talk
Subject: Re: Shopping Cart
Looks like the boss wants to try Able Commerce. Anyone have any good or bad
experiences with it? Any undocumented features (bugs) that I should know
about?
Thanks,
Eric Homa
compudigital.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Warrick, Mark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: CF-Talk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tuesday, December 19, 2000 2:34 PM
Subject: RE: Shopping Cart
>AbleCommerce is a nice out-of-the-box solution.
(http://www.ablecommerce.com) - It requires no ColdFusion knowledge to
maintain.
>
>I haven't tried this one, but it's cheaper than AbleCommerce:
http://www.cartease.com/
>
>If you want to "roll your own" you might try this tutorial:
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/99/49/index4a.html?tw=programming
>
>I'm sure there's more. These just came off the top of my head.
>
>
>---mark
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------
>Mark Warrick
>Phone: (714) 547-5386
>Efax.com Fax: (801) 730-7289
>Personal Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Personal URL: http://www.warrick.net
>Business Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Business URL: http://www.fusioneers.com
>ICQ: 346566
>--------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Eric Homa [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>> Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2000 9:44 AM
>> To: CF-Talk
>> Subject: Shopping Cart
>>
>>
>> Can anyone recommend a shopping cart that is written in CF that
>> can be integrated into our own code? Any shopping cart
>> experiences, good and bad, would be welcome information.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Eric Homa
>> compudigital.com
>>
>>
>>
>
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