Ashley T. Howes, Ph.D. wrote: > I'm looking at Ecommerce engines for Linux. They need to be > feature-rich and allow for multiple languages/currencies, best seller > lists, promotions, customer / purchase reporting, emails on ordering, > shipping, multiple tax calculations, etc. > > I've been examining two at present: OSCommerce and zenCart. zenCart > is a branch of OSCommerce and broke on my Debian install (clicking on > a product causes an error). OSCommerce appears to be the best for me, > but I've been told that the PHP source is rather unstructured and > inconsistent for modifying the solution and writing extensions.
I have a lot of experience of both of these, and they have benefits and drawbacks in equal measure. If you're looking at osC also look at CRELoaded which is closer to osC but has several plugins as "standard"; unlike Zen it hasn't deviated from the osC codebase so osC plugins still work. General comments: What you are looking at is basically overcomplicated code hacked by lots of people over a long period of time. It is great because it can do almost anything, but its hell to work with because the code is a nightmare to work through. We've often looked elsewhere and keep getting drawn back because despite the code issues we always need something that osC has that the others haven't. ZC is about as close as you can get to being a midpoint - the code is a bit better but not really noticeably so (but note that the function names have been changed which makes installing plugins from osC extra hard!). In an ideal world I wouldn't use either but I don't have time to start from scratch. To complicate things even more the ZC forums are pretty good; otherwise I'd discount ZC just because it has most of the drawbacks of osC without all the benefits. But there are people who will give quite a lot of help if you want to implement things yourself. One thing both miss is a template engine, so the program logic and display code are almost completely mixed. Also, the database structure is confusing. Summary: I really wouldn't use either if it weren't that they both provide 99% of what I need and given that I can't find any alternatives that show signs of succeeding. osC/CRE/ZC all have a *lot* of users. > The only part of OSCommerce I don't like is that for updates to the > product lists, it would be good to have multiple admin roles with > restricted access for some, e.g. not giving access to every preference > (including items which can break the shop). There is at least one plugin that allows one of them (can't remember which) to allow each manufacture to maintain their own product lists, which probably comes close to what you need. > What do the rest of you use when building online shops? I used to use > Actinic Catalog a few years ago (Perl backend with Windows frontend). Just to be absolutely clear, both ZC and osC are miles better than Actinic, not least as far as the end-user experience goes (I *hate* buying things from Actinic sites and frequently go elsewhere). I do have some experience of a pretty big Actinic project too (customer choice), but I'd never go back there. Indeed, we had one customer who bought Actinic and before the site went live dumped the licence and switched to osC. > I look forward to reading your replies. Hope that helps. I'd be interested to hear of alternatives, although I doubt there's anything better using PHP as I have searched pretty hard. (Unfortunately "better" has some connection to "popular" because the range of plugins for (eg) payment providers etc requires a lot of users.) This is a big enough issue for us that I would happily consider learning a new language if there was a good alternative elsewhere (assuming the alternative was Python, Ruby, etc not VB!) -- Mark Rogers More Solutions Ltd :: 0845 45 89 555 _______________________________________________ Peterboro mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro
