Like many on here, the whole shopping cart thing is a mess to me. So...I just installed litecommerce, which was fairly painless. And changing the templates, which use Flexy, was fairly easy. But deciphering the PHP code is a nightmare. Who ever said OOP is easy? It just seems to obfuscate the meaning of things. Something as simple as tracking down the origin of order.details.error, which is in a template, becomes maddening.
Im on the verge of trying another cart, mainly because the ioncube-encoded files conflict with Zend Remote debugging. And without this, trying to trace the code using live interactions seems impossible. Im sure this happens to everyone, but what seems like a simple feature list grows and grows... But the primary special requirements I have are the following: Single sign-on means all authentication goes through the primary site. So far, I have hacked this by duplicating user info in the main site and the shopping cart user profiles. Not optimal, but functional. Custom payment processor just a call to a function on the main site. Again, nothing mind-shattering Modified checkout to simply include shipping address fields again, no biggie egoods pin #s support (the reason I choose litecommerce they offer a module that does this well) Meaningful error messages meaning modern validation used on my main site. None of these are overly complex. The challenging part is understanding someone elses code and mindset. The devil is in the details... I have also discovered that integrating a shopping cart with anything other than simple static functions from a primary site can lead to all sorts of config conflicts, from phpini on upwards. Dated PHP4 code...can you say e-warning... So...a general call for help and recommendations. I am thinking of getting X-Cart because at least it is fully open source. But its developed by the same people, so the code may be equally confusing. OSCommerce and its derivatives are out too many bad stories. Any other ideas? Is it too much to ask for a great, easy to modify cart? The cost of the cart is trivial compared to the cost of the custom code, time, maintenance, aggravation, etc. Happy holiday, Cliff _______________________________________________ New York PHP Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online http://www.nyphpcon.com Show Your Participation in New York PHP http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
