« The state of your health | ::: | Not so splendid isolation »

Open source software

23 January 2008 | 0:20 by Wolfie
Filed under: Internet, Technology

Since buying my iMac, I’ve become a big fan of open source software - mainly because all of the software I’d want to buy is too damn expensive, so if there’s a cheaper alternative out there I’m in. I changed from MS Office to NeoOffice (an development of OpenOffice) and all the little bits and pieces that I use on a daily basis either came as part of the operating system (Mail) or I found on the Net (NetNewsWire, TextWrangler, Adium and the most useful of all - QuickSilver).

So when I’m looking for software solutions for a project at work, I’ll look for an open source solution first. At the moment, we’re looking for shopping cart / database software for one of our websites. We’re starting from scratch on this one (this particular brand has never had a website before) and it seemed sensible to make it a database-driven site, to make it easier to change products, add new offers, etc.

The hosting service we’re using comes with Fantastico, which includes three shopping cart packages - ZenCart, OSCommerce and CubeCart. Today, I’ve been taking a look at them, trying to evaluate their suitability for our needs and I’m sorry to report that my faith in open source is starting to flag a bit.

ZenCart was the first one I tried, as we’d seen that in operation on other sites and it looked OK. But, man, the backend is horrible. Really poorly designed, the functionality is all over the place and it’s just not intuitive to use at all. It seems to have all the functionality we need, but it’s going to be a pig to get everyone up to speed with it.

CubeCart seems better; certainly the backend is better designed and with the various bits of functionality well grouped. Unfortunately, it’s got a couple of rather major problems (the way it calculates tax, for example) that have pretty much ruled it out.

OSCommerce has been an absolute nightmare; it doesn’t seem to like being installed via Fantastico, but I finally managed to get a newer version loaded manually (and had to get a MySql problem fixed along the way) and what a disappointment. Almost exactly the look as ZenCart (they have tried to fix it up a bit, but it hasn’t really worked) but with less functionality, and if you want to do something that should be simple (like change a template) you have to hack about with files at an FTP level.

I’m disappointed, to say the least, because I would have thought that in three options I’d have been able to find one that was good for our needs. So, this is a plea for help: I’m looking for a piece of shopping cart / database software that has at least as much functionality as ZenCart, is easier to administer and is preferably open source (ie free). Anyone have any suggestions?

Tags: Shopping Cart • Software • Zen Cart

Comments

4 Responses to “Open source software”

timethief on 23 January 2008 | 5:41

Have you checked these commercial shopping carts?
http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/E-Commerce/Shopping_Carts/index.html
Wolfie on 24 January 2008 | 22:20

@timethief:
Thanks timethief; looks like we’re going to persevere with Zen Cart.
timethief on 25 January 2008 | 0:25

Most of the folks I talked to are staying with Zen Cart. One of them uses Cre-loaded at her place of work work but she uses Zen Cart for her own small business.
brightfeather on 26 January 2008 | 5:53

I see you’re going with zen cart. I thought you might want to see what scriptygoddess did with cube cart http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2008/01/05/some-cubecart-4-minor-mods-including-selectbox-image-changer/
Cheers

[Wolfie edit: I've removed a smiley from this comment, because for some reason they really screw up the way the comment is displayed]