NYCPHP Meetup

[Andrew Yochum]

On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 10:11:17AM -0500, Cliff Hirsch wrote:
> What PHP shopping cart would you recommend? I need a cart where I can
> heavily customize the presentation layer, payment methodology and
> fulfillment methodology (that about covers it all!). One that either
> provides rich back-end functionality or has good hooks into a back-end
> system would be nice too.
>  
> I'm torn between OSCommerce and the OSCommerce fork Zen Cart. Comments?
> Suggestions? Other carts I should look at?

X-Cart is fairly good.  It provides the same functionality that osC
does, and then some out of the box.  The code is clean and easy to
maintain (upgrades & customizations) since there is a full separation of
templates from code and upgrades are available as patches.  The hooks
are decent in all the necessary places - shipping, payment, etc.
However, the code is procedural, and sometimes no use of functions or
spliting of big functions and this, IMO, results in reptition, therefore
unreusable code.  Add-ons/modules are available from both X-Cart and
third parties.  It is not open source, but full source is provided, and
the licensing is inexpensive.  Some of the third party add-ons/modules
are encoded making customization & repurposing of them next to
impossible.  (I'd even offered one vendor around 50x the license price
for the source only to be refused)

osC is just a nightmare IMO.  The functionality is great and the
community around it is large and supportive. Customization is a PITA as
the HTML is embedded in tons of spahetti code.  The community
contributions are sometimes great and sometimes terrible.  Many
incompatibilities can arise as you customize your installation with
contributions.  Any kind of customizations - look and feel or
functionality - often make upgrades seriously difficult.

I can't speak for Zen Cart, but have heard it is better than osC.

On the whole, I have not found a solution that I've been 100% satisfied
with yet, but X-Cart is certainly my pick for now.

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Yochum
Plexpod
andrew at plexpod.com
718-360-0879