Cliff Hirsch cliff-at-pinestream.com |nyphp dev/internal group use| wrote:
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.
I’m 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. I’m 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 else’s 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
it’s 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
I think as far as shopping carts are concerned, we are in the era of
charge by the hour programming. That is where the money is.
I also think it's time to redo the ecommerce platform. We have moved far
beyong where we were when OSCommerce was built, and far beyond skinning
(Zen cart). We don't need a new model for a shopping cart based *web
site*, but a new model for ecommerce functions we can integrate into our
modern web sites. To me that is *not* Shopify et al., because they
charge too much without assuming much if any of the risk in a
transaction. A few percentage points might seem like little at first,
but if it is cream off the top and doesn't reduce liability, it's waste
and waste needs to be eliminated. I think it is foolish to take on a
recurring cost for design (eventhough that is a sweet deal for them).
Right now every successful store I see is hand coded from scratch, and
severely platform dependent. I don't see a lot, but I've seen a dozen or
so in 6 months.
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