NYCPHP Meetup

[Ajai Khattri]

John Nunez wrote:

> I agree osCommerce is a pain to alter.  I have made so many changes 
> that I think it would have been easier to just re-write it.  But then 
> all the modules would not work. Interchange looks good but my perl 
> skills stinks.
>
> How are the features of Mambo w/ phpshop when compared to osCommerce?
>
> osCommerce features needed:
> Top selling items, newsletters, categories and a few other.

The main thing with the mambo-phpshop plugin is that it gives you a 
pretty impressive pre-built backend for managing products, categories, 
vendors, shippers, payment methods, inventory, orders, etc. Since it use 
PHP and MySQL, the setup is pretty simple (in most cases this is a 10 
minute install). In addition to the phpshop plugins, there are added 
separate components that give you things like featured products or 
top-sellers, etc.

As far as customization goes, there are two facets to this: you need to 
build a custom Mambo site template (or several if you like) for the 
overall site, then you will need to customize the various product 
detail, checkout, etc. pages that the shop component uses when loading 
shop pages.

Im still working on a site that uses this stuff so Im no expert and Im 
still learning stuff myself (but having worked through OSC and IC, I am 
already finding it much easier to build this than either of those). I 
usually refer people to www.buyinnovation.com as a reasonable example of 
a mambo-phpshop site. Ill probably publicize the site Im working on when 
its finished.

> New features needed:
> Manufacturer Mini Stores (just pages listing manufacturer's products 
> with a different template), backend security with Groups and tons of 
> other stuff my boss will come up with midway through this project.


Addressing a few of these points:

I believe the mini stores can be handled by the vendor features in 
mambo-phpshop but Ive not had the need to use it yet. (In addition, the 
privileges system allow mini-store owners to manage their own products 
separately from other store owners).

The backend has various privilege levels that you assign to users you 
create - I dont know if these are fine-grained enough for what you're 
asking.

The features list is here: 
http://mambo-phpshop.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=69&Itemid=62 
but the best thing to do is to install and spend an hour playing with it.


-- 
Aj.
Systems Administrator / Developer