It’s been 18 months since my last post (Shocked it’s been so long!) and since then much has changed, I now live in Manchester and working for Wilson & Cooke, a leading Digital Agency in Bury working on high profile projects such as Thomas Cook Sport and Thomas Cook London 2012 (More on these in the coming weeks!)

Anywhoo, there are lot’s of exciting projects on the horizon which I will inform you all about in due course, In the mean time i think it’s time to give this blog a nice modern redesign, don’t you think?

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Some of the more popular Shopping Carts I’ve used in development are:

• Magento
• osCommerce
• Zen Cart

Magento

Magento is a brilliant Shopping Cart in it’s own ways, The Admin Panel for example can be both incredible and awful at the same time. It’s too complex for its own good, although it has an endless amount of features it makes things far more complicated than it ever needs to be. As a result it pretty much requires its own dedicated server just to run it! A far too bloated Shopping Cart that i would only ever use again for a large scale business that has a big enough budget!

osCommerce

osCommerce was one of the first Shopping Cart systems i used, I learnt how it works inside and out which meant it was very flexible and allowing me to fulfil any requirements a client may have. However it is now quite old and out-dated and the code is really poor to work with, there is no logical structure and making simple edits can be a real pain.

Zen Cart

Zen Cart is osCommerce’s younger, better looking brother. It has solved alot of problems osCommerce has and even has an MVC Code structure which make it much easier to work with my separating views from application logic and database interaction. However out of the box it is no better looking than osCommerce and the Admin Panel is no improvement.

Enter…OpenCart

OpenCart, the light at the end of a very long tunnel. Open Cart is the perfect solution to all the Shopping Cart problems we usually encounter.It is an open source shopping cart written in PHP that is getting more popular by the day. It has a very graceful MVC Code Structure that makes it just brilliant to work with and out of the box both the Front end and Back end systems are both elegant and subtle.

Feature Review

OpenCart comes with a wide set of features out of the box that are perfect for a small to medium sized business, including:

• Unlimited Categories
• Unlimited Products
• Templatable
• Multi Currency
• Multi Language
• Multiple Payment Gateways
• Multiple Shipping Methods

Along with the out of the box features, The OpenCart Community is also very active with very helpful members and community made modules that you can very easily integrate into your version of OpenCart.

OpenCart for Developers

For me, what aggravated me the most when using other Open Source shopping carts was how complex it was to modify the functionality of the cart, to extend it and make it do what i want. OpenCart uses a very logical, and surprisingly simple MVC Structure as you can see from the image on the left.

Everything is split up neatly into folders, Model, Controller, View, and Language. This makes developers lives so much easier. As an example, if you are wanting to customise the functionality of the product listing page, a typical URL for a product will be http://www.domain.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=1 (Without URL Rewriting  Enabled). The route is basically also the route you follow in the folder structure to find the files you need to edit. In the above example, to edit the product page you would go to Catalog -> Controller -> Product -> Products.php (route=product/products).

This makes it much easier to manage, It allows for a much quicker development when you can find the files you are looking for within seconds.

Overall, because of its very simple MVC Structure, easy extendability, no fuss attitude I think Open Cart comes on top of all other E-Commerce projects because it can be fitted and tailored to almost any needs and requirements you have.

OpenCart Download

The current version of Open Cart (As of this post) is 1.4.0, and can be downloaded from the OpenCart download page. It is updated very regulary by the creator Daniel.

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I must have come up with about 10 different portfolio designs and built about 5 of them before i decided on this one, which infact was one of the simpler designs i came up with, but I’m happy with it for now, maybe i’ll change it again in a few months to keep it fresh

So anyway, a little about me, I’m a Web Developer based in Halifax, currently working for an IT Company based in Huddersfield. You can see a small chunk of my portfolio on this website which i’m sure you will have already seen!

I have a few interesting projects in the works right now that you will be able to read about on here.

That’s it for now, Expect a rush of content appearing as i go through the ‘I’ve just got my own blog phase’!

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