Open Source PHP E- Commerce Platforms Compared - Web Development in Brighton. Contents. The Contenders. Installation. Theming. Extensibility. Development. Support. Hosting and Performance. Management. CMSSecurity. Consumers. Comparison Table. Winners and Losers. Honourable Mentions. TL; DRThe Contenders. The first name down was the big dog in this particular park - Magento. In a relatively short space of time, it has achieved remarkable success, and its recent acquisition by e. Bay indicates little intent to slow down. Second, showing great promise, is the wonderful Open. Cart. Open. Cart is known for being a speedy way to get an e- Commerce site online and for having an easy- to- work- with codebase. Not as full- featured or . The most common complaint? It's developerd primarily by a company in Paris, so unless your French is up to speed you may find the documentation a touch tricky. The only entry in the list which isn't a specialist e- Commerce platform, Drupal is still an extremely popular choice, largely because of its large community and vast array of extensions. It has strengths in areas where the other contenders are lacking, primarily due to its primary function being as a CMS rather than an e- Commerce system. The Commerce plugin (as one of several options) adds e- Commerce functionality to the system. Home Blog OpenCart eCommerce Website Development for your. OpenCart is one of the most preferred open source eCommerce website development solution for PHP. Comparison of shopping cart software This article has multiple issues. 1.5.52: 2011-06-03: Proprietary: PHP: Magento: Varien. Free add-on: Yes: No: Yes: No: Yes: Yes: Yes: Yes: Yes: 3rd party add-on: Yes: No. Buy PHP 5 E-commerce Development on Amazon.com FREE SHIPPING on qualified. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle. PHP 5 E-commerce Development Create a flexible framework in PHP for a powerful e-commerce. Download PHP 5 E-commerce Development Pdf Free; PHP 5 E-commerce Development 1st Edition; PHP 5 E-commerce Development 1st Edition. Top 10 Free PHP Shopping Carts: Pros and Cons. PHP Shopping Cart #5.And finally, bringing up the rear, is the oldest of the lot - os. Commerce. Despite a history of poor security, difficult maintenance and spaghetti code, it remains one of the most used platforms and has a huge community behind it. Development has slowed recently, prompting rumours that the project may be heading for the graveyard. With the exception of Drupal, where an extension is required to add basic e- Commerce functionality, this comparison will not include functionality added through extensions - I am comparing the products out of the box. Installation. Magento was simple to download, with older versions of the software available in tabs, although, system requirements were hidden away on the downloads page. Installation instructions were provided during the download process, and the installation guide was excellent. Installation was slow, though, largely because of the size of the software. It could have done with more explanatory text - os. Commerce did this well - and any cleanup was handled automatically, which was excellent. Open. Cart has a reassuringly professional feel to its installation procedure. Downloads were easy to find, including earlier versions, although no installation guidance was provided when downloading. Requirements checking was simple and clear, and your stage in the process well indicated. It also lacked explanatory text and there was no option to clean up automatically after itself and set sensible permissions. Presta. Shop downloads were easy to find and grab, though system requirements were rather better hidden, with a link near the bottom of the download page. The download screen links to installation guides on the main Presta. Shop site, which are excellent and include videos - but these are not linked to from the installation procedure, which is a real shame. System requirements checking was simple enough, with clear instruction on what to do to correct any issues. Cleanup is not automated, but is enforced (good idea) - you can't log in until you've renamed your administration folder and deleted the install folder. Finally, each of the two installations run during the writing of this article resulted in errors in either the admin area or the shop itself. Drupal downloads were easy enough to find, and installation instructions and system requirements were both linked obviously from the downloads page. Indications of where you are in the installation process are simple, and requirements checking during the process was good, with clear instructions on how to address any issues. Unfortunately, it is the only of the systems to require you to manually create a configuration file, and this seemed rather unnecessary. As with most of the other platforms, there was little help text along the way. Drupal did clean up after itself though, with the installer being disabled after it has been run. Commerce was less smooth than the others to download - it's not obvious where to go to download the software from the homepage, although the downloads page is very simple. Requirements were specified on the download page, but no installation instructions. It was simple to install, with a guided process that confirmed requirements were met, gave good feedback and included plenty of help text. It might have been nice if it had given the option to run a cleanup script once complete, to wipe the install directory and set sensible permissions. Theming. Magento has an excellent theming engine, with the ability to inherit elements from one theme to another, making theme variants easy and quick to produce. The sheer volume of folders and nesting can be daunting to someone new to the platform. There are some excellent themes to download as well, which can often provide a good starting point. Unfortunately, Magento is also extremely heavy, loading large amounts of CSS and Java. Script by default. Themes often end up being extremely large, making ongoing management sometimes more painful than with other systems. Open. Cart uses PHP files for its templates, which is something I am a fan of (why introduce a new variable and control syntax, processed by PHP, when it already has these things?) and as a result the templates are simple to write and maintain. Themes are held in folders, so many can be installed to a site at once. There are plenty of themes available as well, both free and paid. Presta. Shop makes use of the well- known Smarty templating engine, and can handle multiple templates being installed at one time. The themes don't have the ability, like Magento, to inherit elements from each other, but they are easy to build and simple to maintain. There are plenty of themes available as well, both free and paid. Theming Drupal is not considered terribly good fun. Designers and front end coders working with it for the first time have a distinctive haunted look, largely because the parts of each page can come from so many different places. On the plus side, multiple templates can exist side by side, and templates can include extra functionality when needed. There are also some excellent templates available to download, although most will require some work to make them fit the specifics of your site, depending upon the modules you have installed. The default os. Commerce theme is terribly outdated and a major let down. As with the other platforms, though, there are some stunning templates available. Unfortunately, there is no integrated templating engine, and as a result many templates require changing of core files for installation. Extensibility. All of the contenders score well on extensibility, with both the type, range and ease of building of extentions (a. Drupal and Magento are pretty even - Drupal has a much larger collection of extensions, largely because they are quicker and cheaper to build, but Magento's are generally of a higher quality. The rest are all fairly evenly matched, with extensions numbering in the thousands providing similar added functionality to all of the platforms. Open. Cart has a slight edge over Presta. Shop and os. Commerce when it comes to extensions development though, thanks to better documentation than Presta. Shop and better architecture than os. Commerce. The most commonly required extensions - for payment and shipping configuration - are all present on all platforms for most of the large providers. Development. Most stores require at least some ongoing development, integrating with new services and adding new features over time. So how do these platforms compare when it comes to having some custom work done? It is difficult to know how to score Magento when it comes to development. The system's architecture, inheritance setup, XML config system and use of the MVC pattern all make it usually excellent to work with. It provides plenty of API interfaces, reusable objects, and has intelligent use of namespacing to reduce the risk of conflicts between modules. The code is also clean and well documented throughout. On the other hand, it can be slow to write for - it is a monster, with hundreds of files in a nested structure that really takes some getting used to. The observer pattern used frequently in Magento can make debugging some problems deeply painful, as you need to find which of dozens of observers are causing a headache. Overall, it is the most technically advanced, and by some way, but that carries with it something of an overhead, making development for Magento often more expensive than comparable systems. Open. Cart is, for the most part, pretty simple to develop for. It's generally faster than Magento, thanks to a simpler structure and faster page times. It uses an MVC pattern, and has great documentation. It does suffer from an unfortunate folder structure, where a single simple custom module can have files in lots of different parts of the directory tree, but once you are familiar with the layout this is less of an issue. There is a lot of repetition in creating Open. Cart modules as well - Magento's easy Grid/Edit/Form setup is much simpler and faster. Overriding core functionality is also a painful experience, relying on third party modules that search and replace within code, rather than hooks or class overrides. Despite these shortcomings, generally Open. Cart's simplicity makes developing modules more of a pleasure than with some of the competition. Presta. Shop has a better module folder structure than Open. Cart, similar to Magento's way of doing things, with every module in its own distinct folder. The development documentation has not been great in the past, though does seem to be improving. Presta. Shop also provides a robust system for overriding core functionality as well as a variety of hooks and an API.
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