Zen Cart – A Premier Open-source E-commerce Solution (although Magento is hot on its heels)

Lately, many people have been asking the Frog to build an e-commerce solution for them. After investigating various solutions, I settled on Zen Cart for many of the same reasons that I choose Joomla!. The open-source products I looked at included Ubercart, Magneto, OS Commerce, CRE Loaded, and finally, Zen Cart. I installed and tested instances of both Magneto and Zen Cart.

Magneto comes highly recommended by several of the PHP developers I spoke to. Albeit still a young open-source project, both commercial and community support are growing really fast, and I do mean really. For one thing, a highly desirable feature, support for multiple stores, is there right out-of-the-box. Get this: it grew from a landmark 500,000 downloads about a month ago, to over 525,000 just a few days ago! Now that’s HOT! And most of the Magento-based stores I’ve seen are akin to works of art; I am struck by the beauty of how they’re presented.

It seems as though significant Magneto updates are coming out almost daily. Take this example: a few days ago, I “attended” a webinar where a rep from Google showed us how to implement a recent built-in feature: the Google web site optimizer! Now if that’s not a significant vote of faith for this e-commerce system, I don’t know what is! You can bet the Frog will be doing more with this promising system.

Then there’s Ubercart , which was created specifically to work in conjunction with another open-source product: Drupal.(funny name, great product!). As another form of a CMS (content management system), it’s similar to Joomla!, but that’s really where the similarity ends; Drupal is far more full-featured. Without a doubt, Drupal’s configuration is significantly more involved than Joomla, but as a community-support style system that blithely supports massive amounts of content, can be updated by many people at once, Drupal has become widely used. At last count, Drupal is used by the likes of Warner Brothers records, Popular Science, and Sony Electronics, plus about 85,000 others. Here’s a link to more info.

Getting back to Zen Cart, it is built on the OS Commerce base, making it one of the most mature and stable open-source solutions. This is because OS Commerce has been around for quite some time. While CRE Loaded is also built on the OS Commerce base, it does not offer the depth, add-ons or community support that Zen Cart does. I found Zen Cart to be very straightforward to configure, and had an instance of it up and running in short order.

Joomla! – A terrific turn-key web site building system for your business.

After working only on static sites, I recently, I created my first, and second commercial “Joomla!”-based web sites. I am happy to confirm that the content management system (CMS) has very much proven to be a system that is highly workable for a small business, as well as being rather fun to work with. I could not be more pleased with the results: the clients noticed an almost immediate increase in unique visitors after we published the sites. Even better, it’s true that a person with basic word-processing skills can perform most every update on the site, from pages, to adding images and links.

It was no accident that I chose “Joomla!”. A few years ago, I heard about this new type of web site building system called a “content management system” or CMS, during course-work on the Linux operating system and interaction with Linux User Groups. Further, it was said that it enabled a non-programmer to easily perform web site updates in a WYSIWYG-style interface. I realized it had the potential to address the needs of many small businesses. As I tend to do, I embarked on a thorough investigation of several of the more mature of these products. And I didn’t stop at online research; I also went right to the source and spoke to a number of developers that work with this type of system every day. “Joomla!” soon leapt ahead as a clear contender.

Unlike many other open-source products of the genre, the Joomla project is very mature. By this, I mean that there are literally thousands of well-written quality add-ons, known as extensions, available for it. These extensions serve to extend Joomla’s base functionality. An example is a product I recently installed and configured that enables a completed form to be e-mailed. Not only that, you can resolve most problems by contacting any one of thousands of developers via the forums at the main Joomla site or any number of other companies.

As you might guess, Joomla! remained as the top two or three contender for a number of reasons. For one, it was paramount that I be able to build sites that offered a high degree of usability and accessibility support, as well as plenty of built-in SEO support. Any which way you turn, Joomla excels at that. What’s more, Joomla offers a high degree of built-in support for search engine bots.

Hence, I became convinced that this turn-key style system would be an excellent solution for the small business that needs content on their site to be updated frequently, and didn’t want to either wait for or pay a professional to get these small tasks done in a timely manner.

As I mentioned, Joomla! is designed out-of-the-box to be search-engine friendly (SEF). In fact, each page on a site has a built-in place for entry of keywords which is easily accessible through the standard WYSIWYG interface. There is a wealth of firms offering great templates to use as a base for a quick turn-around.

Here are links to the two sites I created:

www.wandercontrol.com

www.jameslyle.com

Slide show – Bar Camp Orlando April 08

A few shots I took while attending Bar Camp Orlando this past April. I learned a lot and made some awesome contacts.

Adobe Releases Web-based Photoshop Express Beta

Recently, Adobe released the beta of Photoshop Express, a free photo editor. Yes, you read that right – it’s FREE, a real departure from the norm for Adobe. As you might expect, it’s based on their flagship product, Photoshop CS3. The other big deal about this product is that to use it, all you need do is go to Adobe’s web site, and sign-up. It’s run completely within a web browser, no need to download a thing. You simply upload your digital photos via their slick interface, do your things to them, and store up to 2 gigabytes of them on Adobe’s servers.

Full-featured Slide-show Interface

One toadily neat feature of Photoshop Express is that you can create a beautifully rendered feature-rich slide-show from your photos, (take a look at one I created here.) and then generate a link to e-mail to your friends, or place on a web site. Even better, if you’re a Facebook user, Photoshop Express has the benefit of a direct interface with the social network!

Down the Saas path We Go

This product sees Adobe joining the tide wave of companies that are working diligently to give us great reasons to return to their web pages; I must say, I’m lovin’ the trend so far. In technical jargon, this new product is know as “Software-as-a-service” (Saas). With study after study solidifying the fact that dollars spent on web-based purchases are one of the few places that will continue to have positive numbers, we’re not going to see this trend slow down anytime soon.

Still in Beta Test mode – Snafu’s Possible

First of all, remember Photoshop Express is in beta testing mode right now. This means that there is a good likelihood that you’ll run unto a few snafu’s here and there. There’s a handy-dandy feedback button to make it easy to let Adobe know if you do! I used the slide show tool to create a show from some images I shot at a house and garden show in the Orwin section of Winter Park this past April. There is a resize slider that appears when you hover over the upper right portion of the screen.

View Orwin Slide Show in Adobe Photoshop Express