Oscommerce - time to move on?
We have been regular users of Osc for several years and rolled out a numer of ecommerce sites to good effect. Osc has been good to us and we are grateful for its existence. However, its development has been stagant for some time and most of the core team are no longer around. It also produces bloated, non compliant code which is nowhere near accessible. These factors plus the fact that Osc is now being successfully discredited by some of our local competitors, has persuaded us that it is perhaps time to move on.
But to what? I've been checking out the likes of Zen cart and Cube cart but they are not much better. Closest I can get to what we need is JShop which has some very good basic functionality but lacks the contributions of Osc - so its pay for any add-ons you need. The commercial asp carts seem very expensive and again bespoking is very expensive.
So where now? Maybe we offer Osc as a "cheap and cheerful" option (but with limitations) and keep other "pro" carts for the higher spec roll-outs? For example, we are in the running for a large cycle store contract and I just don't feel its appropriate to offer Osc for this kind of job anymore - it needs to meet web standards and be, to some degree, future-proof.
I'm interested to hear what other Osc users are currently thinking and also any experiences with other carts which fit the compliant, css, table-less code requirements.
Dave J
Comment by Yusuf — August 5, 2006 @ 3:11 pm
Check out freeCSScart… coming soon!
Comment by Daniel Kerr — August 5, 2006 @ 4:30 pm
Your welcome to join my little project!
http://www.opencart.com
Comment by Dave J — August 5, 2006 @ 6:58 pm
Yusuf,
Isn't that going to be a hosted cart? I need the flexibility to use on my own servers - please tell us more….
Daniel,
Interesting - where have you got to in the development please? Do tell us more….
Dave J
Comment by geebandit — August 5, 2006 @ 8:55 pm
I've been using VirtueMart for my smaller sites nowadays which seems to be working out ok so far. Maybe worth a look if you haven't already: http://virtuemart.net/
Comment by burt — August 8, 2006 @ 11:26 pm
I'm about to rejoin that community as I just learned that "Johnson" is no longer a part of the osCommerce Team.
Having not looked at the forum for almost one year, and not delved into osCommerce code for almost as long, I expect it will be a shock to the system.
Comment by Daniel Kerr — August 9, 2006 @ 4:47 pm
I've got up to the checkout on opencart. I've come to a bit of a stop because I need to create a modules system for payment and shipping.
I have updated alot of code since my last file release.
If you intreasted in helping me with this project just email me.
There is much to be done.
Comment by Daniel Kerr — August 9, 2006 @ 4:48 pm
I hated Johnson aswell!
the guys a dick!
Comment by Tinh Trieu — August 11, 2006 @ 2:30 am
I remember the good old days of Osc…. they were somewhat painful though. I used to help roll out some Osc shopping sites, and I find it really cumbersome when training customers on how to use it. The dev team I worked with found it a pain to wade through the code.
The flow of the admin section just wasn't intuitive, and moving around the admin section to add products (in particular clothing) was a real pain.
The only thing I liked about Osc was that there has been such a huge community around it. So there was always people to help out, and it was written in PHP [cheap hosting :)]. There were also heaps of modules to add on.
I probably wouldn't recommend Osc to anyone now unless they couldn't find any other more user friendly shopping cart software.
I currently use a custom built shopping cart software for our poker online store (http://www.pokerchampion.com.au). It's simple and it's just got what we need.