Open Source Shopping Carts
My latest web site design is complete. It was for Red Haute Designs.
Red Haute Designs was established in 2006 and provides high quality, fashionable accessories at affordable prices for women and children of all ages. Their current offerings include a wide array of earrings, necklaces, bracelets and jewelry sets as well as specialty bridal, children, and exclusive collegiate lines. Their jewelry products are manufactured from the finest materials with a particular emphasis in freshwater pearls.
A few challenges were faced with designing this website. The first stemmed from finding an open source solution that contained a shopping cart. A few solutions (with full templates designed :/) were tried but were not up to the task of being a full shopping cart. I needed more than just a simple implementation - one that I could customize the interface, change the back-end code (open source), and one that was easy for the client to use. Many solutions required paying a fee for their software and I wanted to avoid this. I tried several different setups, including Wordpress with WP e-Commerce, Joomla with VirtueMart, Zen Cart and osCommerce.
Each of those solutions contained what I believed to be a fatal flaw. The Wordpress plugin hardly worked at all and development was slim to null, VirtueMart wasn’t up to date with the latest version of Joomla or fully compatible with the server settings I was using, osCommerce hasn’t been updated in ages, although development is still apparently happening, and Zen Cart was really the same. I continued searching and came upon a relatively new project called OpenCart.
OpenCart seemed to fit my needs and although it is being developed by a one-man team (I guess 2 now since I plan to submit some code fixes and changes that I’ve made while working on Red Haute Designs) it worked well, was being actively developed, worked with the server I was using and it was VERY easy for the client to use. If you’ve used other products such as osCommerce, the back-end can be very confusing; not the case with OpenCart. I’ll quote the client from Red Haute Designs - “…I have been able to easily add our products!” and “That is awesome that it was a free program as it is sooo easy to use!”.
There are a few flaws in the program that I’ve had to change up the PHP or make adjustments to fix - such as file permissions for user uploaded product images. This was fixed with a crontab chmodding the images in the upload directory. However, job well done and the client seems pleased. I’ll be adding some code changes and additions to OpenCart in the near future. I think this project has great potential to become a widely used open source shopping cart.
You can see OpenCart in live action at Red Haute Designs.