Open Source E-Commerce: OpenCart v1
A current project involves a foray into online retailing, something I’ll be doing a lot more of in the coming months. As a prelude I downloaded latest versions of major current open-source e-commerce platforms: magento, zen-cart, phpshop, opencart – and dived into the code.
I didn’t stay submerged for long!
For simple shops OpenCart impressed me the most. While lacking many of the features of others the MVC code structure was clean and easy to interpret. Magento fails in this with it’s bulk and somewhat overly complex layover of the Zend Framework. Zen-Cart & others, though php5.2 compatable, are php4 framework based, the code is messy and without structure, and as I’ve mentioned before there’s a big difference! As php5 rears its head these platforms will and MUST be replaced by faster & more complient pattern-based platforms utilising the power of php5.3+ architecture if php is to compete with .NET & Java. I was also impressed with the jQuery implementation.
OpenCart fitted the bill, and to prove it I’ve released a mod for it within 1 day of getting the code…
