Free Stuff - My Top 5 Open Source Applications

5) osCommerce

I have a sort of love hate relationship with osCommerce, it is a fantasticly powerful, FREE opensource shopping cart software. The bug I have with it is that it does take alot of customisation and plugins to get the application ready for a spacific project. I am now starting to lean towards xcart as software of choice, it is not free - but you get the source code and are able to customise. Again you do need customisation, but you get support (beyond free forums) and there are several great options

4) Drupal

This is my CMS of choice, nice clean with loads of addons. I actually packaged up the software with a selection of great plugins a while ago. It is still available for download from this site

3) FireFox

Ok this is my second browser. Doing website building work I need to get things running in the most popular browser first, then check in FF. Firefox has a fantastic array of plugins and toolbars, and I am probably very guilty of not using FF as much as I should.

2)Word press.

Blog Software, you are looking at an example now.

1) Open Office

Ah yes. Why pay microsoft hundreds when you can get it for free? (There are some very good reasons to use microsoft office, but I will gloss over that just now) Mostly compatible with Microsoft Office, Open Office has a spreadsheet, wordprocessor, database and presentation software that can be used to open, view and edit the microsoft equivelents. The big drawback is that OO is NOT compatable with Microsoft Macros - but has its own macro language.

October 19th, 2007 Posted by admin | tools, oscommerce, xcart, x-cart, php | no comments

Shopping Cart Software.

Small side track from Affiliate Marketing - but I have been working with various shopping cart packages these past few month on a variety of side projects. Just thought that I would list the major contenders here along with a few thoughts.

osCommerce and Derivitives.

I have been using osC for years but have passed over the original osCommerce package for some of the derivitives.

I have used the major osCommerce derivitive CRELoaded on several projects of late, most notably www.shopscifi.co.uk, www.cricketretail.com and www.somethingsmellsnice.com after a bit of a teething problems a year or two ago with  CRELoaded I have really adopted this as my shopping cart software of choice.

The other major osC derivative shopping cart software is Zen cart, though I have not used this directly I have seen it in action with ForbiddenPlanet  and am quietly impressed by the results. 

All the major osCommerce derived software have great communitys supporting the shopping carts with help, advice and contributions in form of modules

Away from osCommerce software there is still alot of choice.

CubeCart.

I have played with this and it is OK. Nice and tidy. Limited functionallity in the free version - but fork out the £40 (or so) for the full version and add some of the contributions and you have a fantastic little shopping site on your hands.

http://www.cubecart.com/site/home/ - again there is an active forum and dedicated mods and skins site at http://www.cubecart.org/forums/index.php

X Cart

X Cart - Professional - slightly more expensive and there is a very affordable support and a huge range of (paid for) addons. Best thing about this is that it uses Smarty Template Engine based templates, thus making it exceptionally easy to drop chunks of code into a template - ie:

<title>{$entry.Name|title}</title>

<a href={$entry.Name|link}>{$entry.Name|productname}</a>

There is not so much a development community - but a competitivly priced development team to provide help support and extra functionallity .

CMS Addons

It is worth noting that popular CMS systems have ecommerce plugins. Drupal have an ecommerce system see here.

Joomla has an ecommerce plugin - virtuemart 

 Free And Simple eCommerce Solutions.

Ok - so after all this we must pay a quick mention to the PAYPAL shoping cart  - there done it. Ideal for the trader with no programming knowledge - other than the occasional bit of HTML and no budget to get a developer in.

A slightly more elegant system  - free and easy is mals eCommerce this works in a similar way to the paypal shopping cart but can intergrate with a number of different online payment systems a fantastic implimentation of this can be found at http://www.bridal-jewellery.co.uk

February 2nd, 2007 Posted by scifind | oscommerce, cubecart, xcart, x-cart, ecommerce, php, mysql, paypal | 2 comments