Bill Cooke is a Freelance Web Designer and Graphic Designer based out of Toronto, Canada.
OpenCart – The new kid on the block
Recently I came across a new piece of open source e-commerce software called OpenCart. After reading about it and doing a little research i decided to give it a try for a recent project i did for a client. This post is my initial thoughts and review of this relatively new open source peice of software.
Open cart is an open source cart developed by the Open Cart development community/team. It is currently at version 1.4.4 released March 15, 2009. OpenCart is programmed in PHP using an MVC(+L) style framework for the code. This is a good process they used to develop, as it separates the code into “layers”, so that core functions are separated from “display” elements. This allows OpenCart to be more easily modified for front end display and templates, and potentially be upgraded with bug fix released without having to affect display code as much. This also gives OpenCart the ability to have it’s contributions for the community installed in an easier fashion then a piece of software like OsCommerce. Mind you, it still can take some manual file code modifications depending on the contribution, and it’s not as simple as download and install features like Joomla or WordPress have, but it is easier then dealing with osCommerce for adding contributions.
OpenCart features that come in the core download of the software include a simple content management system, a easy to manage product system, SEO features, several shipping and payment modules built in, the ability to turn on or off and move around the “side boxes” and much more. OpenCart also comes with a pretty nice looking default “theme” or template, and there are many available for free from the OpenCart site as well.
There are a few things I didn’t like about open cart, or things other developers should be aware of.
- There is no way to “copy” product attributes from one product to another, so if you have to work with a lot of products w/ attributes it can be very cumbersome.
- There is no way to import/export product data into a workable format to edit in excel or other editors (there is a great contribution for this that is easy to install)
- the front page text is edited on the store settings page, and is not in the content manager section, which can be a little confusing for people
- there is currently no working FREE ups or Fed-ex shipping modules (they are in development)
- ther “SEO” urls are a little buggy sometimes. A few times when re-importing products from the excel export contribution, the seo module no longer works for mod-writes unless you manually go back through all your products and re enter your seo url name. Also by default the SEO urls system does not add a file extension to the rewritten URL, so you need to specify the file extension in the field for the product
those are the main issues I have come across while using open cart myself. Overall I am VERY pleased with the cart, and think it has a lot of potential. In-fact I am considering switching over to it to use for my more simple e-commerce projects for clients who don’t need a lot of custom features for their store.
You can download and review the features of OpenCart at http://www.opencart.com/
3 Responses to “OpenCart – The new kid on the block”
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Well, I just wrote a nice long post to contribute to your site. But I wasn’t sure if the captcha was a lower case “L” or an upper case “I”, and I chose small L. The problem is that is blew out my post. (Infuriating).
Anyway, I would like to know your thoughts on 1.48b
I used OpenCart because it was clean and simple. It’s fast. It desperately needs a proper importation/exportation tool.
Also, batch updates would be key. But for a small cart with a lot of power and fluid simplicity, OpenCart is the way to go.
Many of the other carts are good too. I looked into some, but this little cart offered big power in a small package. Read the forums, do a demo site and work out the minor bugs (which all carts have mind you). I had to make about 5 minor patches and one patch I wrote that let you view Featured Products by Sort_Order rather than Alpha. And that was easy to figure out for a non-programmer. just needed to change up the SQL query.
Thanks for your blog.
Im playing with 1.48b now actually for a new project. It does have a few quirks.. One that is p*ssing me off is the way the conig files work now, as i had it set up to use on my localhost, and now putting a site on a live server, oc dosent seem to want to change to use the live www server rather then the localhost address (even when i edited the admin/config.php accordingly.. sigh.
Does have alot of promise tho..