Thread

Yesterday i spent 5 hours figuring out Magento, and i still don’t know how to show something on the front page. Their help base is very complete, but confusing as hell.
I’ll give PrestaShop a try today, to see if it has everything i need. I’ll post the results here. 😊

Prestashop has virtually no documentation, I would not recommend it to someone who needs to do any extra development with it.

So, i tried Prestashop and i’m satisfied. Since i’m not going to add custom code to it, it’s perfect. I only miss a translation into my language (pt-br), but that’s easy to solve.
I’m developing a simple website using CI, and i thought i would have problems using an external shopping cart, but everything works fine so far. I’m pretty sure i’ll have to change the .htaccess though, but that’s no harm at all.

I’ve used ZenCart (which is an active offshoot of OSCommerce) in the past for a couple of projects. I got frustrated with it in the end as I had to hack it so often just to change minor things that couldn’t be customised.

If you’ve got the time, I would roll your own one – which is what I’m intending to do. That way you can customise it how you want.

wfcart (http://www.webforcecart.com/): “a free PHP shopping cart class you can use a component of a PHP based online store. It’s designed as a component for PHP developers who would rather write their own store rather than a complete solution.”

Had to modify the class to have it play nice with db_sessions (allow users to save their carts, create “wishlists”, etc). Not really a “shopping cart solution”, but it gives me the basics and allows me to create the rest…

I am considering going this route. If you’d be willing to share the modifications you made for wfcart to play nice with CodeIgniter, I’d love to see them.

Thanks!
Leigh

I have used magento on a couple of projects. Out of the box it has a lot of features. If you want to add anything custom it is very difficult to extend. Its built using Zend…

I have also used oscommerce and xcart. there are a couple of others that I wouldn’t mind giving a shot. I think I bookmarked them all on my delicious…

Might be of interest:

http://dev.ellislab.com/svn/CodeIgniter/trunk/system/libraries/Cart.php

OXID has a free and very powerful CE Community Edition
http://www.oxid-esales.com/

I’m currently doing a shop using Interspire’s shopping cart and I have mixed feelings about it. The CP works really well (for the end user), but I do wish it was a bit easier to customize, the sheer amount of templates, subtemplates and snippets it uses to output even a basic product page is simply bewildering.

Community activity on the Interspire forums is close to non-existent, and, although you can e-mail support, the answers are often far from satisfying. Right now we’re holding off going live because of support for Ogone (a major European payment gateway), which is said “to be coming” in a next version with no ETA given.

And, for software of that price (the pro edition is close to 1K$) having to translate the language files for the CP and shop to Dutch myself is simply unforgivable.

I’m keeping an eye on Magento, but their templating system just seems weird (I mean really, XML based layout files?).

I’m keeping an eye on Magento, but their templating system just seems weird (I mean really, XML based layout files?).

I was confused by this also… but its not that hard, once you experimented with it. XML are only the Layouts that granulates down to php-based templates!

The tricky & easy thing is the incremental change of the templates, i mean only change what you need to change without cloning the whole default directory.

Very good beginners tutorial http://www.magentocommerce.com/design_guide

I’m currently doing a shop using Interspire’s shopping cart and I have mixed feelings about it. The CP works really well (for the end user), but I do wish it was a bit easier to customize, the sheer amount of templates, subtemplates and snippets it uses to output even a basic product page is simply bewildering.

Couldn’t agree anymore - I found trying to do any type of templating just too confusing!

I am using Bit-cart ecommerce shopping cart software soultions they are highly active in support and always coming with unique and flexible solutions for selling. I am new to ecommerce and so i dont know how to make changes in open source applications

I am considering going this route. If you’d be willing to share the modifications you made for wfcart to play nice with CodeIgniter, I’d love to see them.

Thanks!
Leigh

I am over a year late on this but in case anyone else need this, I’ll explain what I did.

First, store wfCart as a library. For convenience, I renamed it Cart.

Append the following lines to wFCart->_update_total():

$CI =& get_instance();
$CI->db_session->set_userdata('cart', serialize($this));

Then in the controller used to handle POST requests for the cart:

/**
 * Loaded user cart
 *
 * @var Cart
 */
public $loaded_cart;
function __constructor()
{
    $this->load->library('cart');
    if(is_string($this->db_session->userdata('cart'))) {
        $this->loaded_cart = unserialize($this->db_session->userdata('cart'));
    }
    if(!is_object($this->loaded_cart)) {
        $this->loaded_cart = new Cart();
    }
}

// Sample Add Product Method
public function addProduct()
{
    // Figure out product details and qty from
    // input data received and then…
    $this->loaded_cart->add_item(...);
}

// Empty Cart (nice and simple)
public function emptyCart()
{
    $this->loaded_cart->empty_cart();
    $this->db_session->unset_userdata('cart');
}

$this->loaded_cart now has the user’s wfCart instance and you can do as you please.
If you have any questions feel free to ask!

I ran across a full shopping cart using CI called opencart. it seems promising and worth a look

I ran across a full shopping cart using CI called opencart. it seems promising and worth a look

OpenCart doesn’t use CI… but it is probably one of the best options out there right now.