A few weeks ago I started work on a ecommerce project with a budget. As with many projects on a tight budget and indeed some without, the lack of budget was made up with some open source assistance. This takes the sting out of some of the development costs and thankfully for ecommerce products there is no shortage of free or inexpensive open source offerings. I’ve been away from this kind of development for a while so it was nice to go back and rediscover what is on offer out there.
Magento was my first port of call as it does look head and shoulders above any other free offering and indeed the feature set looks rich enough to compete with many commercial offerings. What I discovered rather quickly and frustratingly was that Magento is horribly complicated to skin and manipulate. The learning curve of Magento is quite possibly the steepest I have ever come across in open source product. I’d love to get to grips with Magento and really learn the ins and outs but it seems that Magento skinning and tweaking is a skill picked up over the course of months and months rather than days which is really what you need when you are coming into a project that is already on a tight budget.
osCommerce seems to be going strong after many years of open source development. The issue I always had with osCommerce however is that it feels badly put together and not entirely secure. The organisation of the source files and the admin interface were always pretty shabby. Now in osCommerce’ defence the last time I used a release was many years ago but unless there has been a complete overhaul I can’t see this being much improved over that version.
Similarly Zen Cart seems to suffer the same fate. The admin interface screams osCommerce and if Zen Cart is simply osCommerce re-labeled (not confirmed but likely) it will more than likely have osCommerce like issues.
Cubecart, X-Cart and similar sit on on a level above the free offerings but below the full blown commercial offerings. They are solid products but are still commercial offerings which deduct, however minor, from a project’s budget. Had I not found the next open source product in this list I would have probably stumped for one of these or one of there many derivatives which are all fairly similar in features and set-up. Again solid offerings but not within the open source range.
My saviour. Quite frankly not a great deal seems to have changed with regards to open source ecommerce products since the break through of Magento apart from this neat piece of development.
The structure of OpenCart follows MVC, Model View Controller and in general the code is nicely put together and feels clean as well as secure. Following the MVC convention makes OpenCart as flexible and as complex as you need or want it to be. The admin interface is clean and rather aesthetically pleasing whilst being packed with features.
The only grumble I have over OpenCart is that it’s realtively young and as such the community and documentation is not quite on par with say, Magento or osCommerce. As the product matures however I am sure that this will only improve.
The most impressive feature of OpenCart is without doubt the lack of bloat. Possibly a positive knock on affect of its young age, the simplicity of the code and the way it is structured in comparison with the punch it packs is quite glorious.
As I’ve mentioned above major players in the open source community don’t come and go overnight particularly not in a category as crucial as ecommerce development. So it wasn’t particularly surprising to find that there was not a great number of new stable ecommerce offerings to choose from.
Magento I feel is a definite market leader and something that every self respecting developer should take the time to understand if they are working regularly with ecommerce projects that require open source assistance. OpenCart for my money however can not be beaten for feature set versus learning curve. OpenCart apart from the usual road bumps in using a new open source package has been delightful and will be a project I keep an eye on for any future ecommerce projects.
If I’ve missed any great open source eccomerce offerings, please do let me know in the comments or via the contact page.
