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.
