back again

sussexrob — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 18:21:58 +0000

Message to Shirthead really...

Looking back at some of the sites you have done, they look stunning

Any tips like how did you do the graphics, or were they proffesionally designed elsewhere

As a business i find it difficult to find the time in the day to do what i need to as it is so any
pointers on moving from a £20 job a month to ecommerce or zencart would be great.

Would love to have one, just seems to overwhelm me where to start..

Cheers

Rob

cheers

sussexrob — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 11:05:51 +0000

ah i didnt even know about that site as im so new to php

much cheaper than a 3 inch thick £30 book then eh

cheers loads

rob

Shirthead — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 10:22:05 +0000

The best PHP book is definitely php.net

What's probably worth doing is to just set up some cheap/free hosting and install a store that you can play around with to get used to it. There are plenty of people who will help (for a fee) if you get stuck. In fact.... that's my full-time job

Zencart / osCommerce uses a lot of it's own classes - which is confusing when you first start out. If you persevere it does all suddenly fall into place and make sense though.

learning php

sussexrob — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 09:54:35 +0000

Cheers for your replies all of you

I would like to move away from ekmpowershop in the end and do the site on my own but as i don't know PHP , have dabbled with asp in the past etc but i would still class myself as a begineer as im a IT engineer not a programmer ,

Is it worth buying a general book on PHP so at least i can recognise the commands in the scripts at least? even if the book isnt based on zencart or oscommerce

Otherwise it looks jibberish to us nonprogrammers

In the long run I would like to change all the graphics as some sites people have done look really good

Cheers

Rob

Shirthead — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 09:05:02 +0000

Zen cart & osCommerce are basically 2 forks for the same development. I've produced a couple of dozen osCommerce sites and never had a security issue.

Not sure how much use the books would be. Open Source developments move pretty quickly and I'd imagine books go out of date pretty quickly. Much better to use the wiki and forums which are of course updated continually.

osCommerce can be a little daunting at first, but it isn't all that bad. Once you know what you are doing you can get one installed and configured in under 10 minutes. Getting it to do exactly what you want and look how you want does of course take longer.

My only complaint (well, criticism really) is that the code and design in osCommerce are too closely integrated. You have to do quite a lot of editing to change the look completely. There are however contributions that improve on this - although I don't use them myself.

good looking ecommerce sites

sussexrob — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 23:43:01 +0000

Hi Guys
I have zencart on my host but not used it, seems a nightmare to configure or even change the look... anyone got any directions on the subject?

Also, alot of you are using oscommerce but i hear there are security issues with it compared to zencart?

I am a IT engineer, but website design baffles me but am starting a company up but being stubborn want to buid a site but at the moment i am using one of the £20 a month jobs. Feels the same as not building a pc, but going out and buying one...yuck! any guidance on oscommerce or zencart would be great.

There are a couple of books flying around on oscommerce, and one on zencart on a american site...worth getting?

Any feedback would be great.

Rob

Bkag — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 11:01:32 +0000

I am in the proccess of making my oscommerce based site but havent had much time but even pritty much stock it works well and handels orders nicely.

Shirthead — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 16:30:19 +0000

Big fan of osCommerce here too. Use it a lot in my "day job". Very capable platform that is highly customisable and well supported. Pretty well coded as well, which makes life easier in the long run.

Here's a couple we've done recently (I assume it is OK for me to post these, if not can a Mod delete them?)
findwatches.co.uk
findjewellery.co.uk
underthetop.com
telemark-pyrenees.com
nutr-ivital.co.uk
byjo.co.uk

JeevesBond — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 16:03:53 +0000

navalan wrote: I'm also thinking about dotnetnuke tools

But then you'll be tied into using Microsoft web servers?! That would be silly, especially if you need to use some Open Source shopping cart like OSCommerce. Some other things about DotNetNuke I've found (these are just my opinion, please correct me if wrong! ):

It's not Web Standards Compliant
It's not as well-known or supported as many other Open Source CMS
If you lock yourself into Windows web hosts you'll also lock-down your choice. Most other CMS rely on PHP and MySQL, which are designed to run on Linux.
There aren't as many plugins/extensions for this CMS as others.
If you wanted to integrate other Open Source products (e.g. a Forum integrated with a CMS) you'll probably find a lack of choice due to the platform you're using.

Dissenters will point out that you can use PHP and MySQL on a windows platform. Why would you do this unless you absolutely had to? Aside from that, DotNetNuke is not as good as something like Drupal, which has very good community support, and lots of plugins. It's also Web Standards compliant.

If you're setting up e-commerce sites for small businesses, you'll need to be using something like OSCommerce (currently the most popular choice), it's Free/Open Source and requires PHP and MySQL. There are other choices available, such as Zencart

With regard to the original question: I would seriously consider what your choice has that other Open Source purveyors of fine solutions don't. I had a quick look around, and considering they charge for their product, I couldn't see much that would differentiate it from something like OSCommerce.

The other thing to remember is that "cool features" in your cart do not sell product, if anything they detract from the product and confuse the customer. Just had a meeting with a customer who am building an OSCommerce site for, we went through the functionality provided by default and removed about a third of it. Fluff is usually useless.

timjpriebe — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 12:59:46 +0000

I've used osCommerce on clients' sites as well. Sometimes the payment method module doesn't work without some tweaking, but aside from that I've been happy.

If you'd like to see any of them, here are the sites I've used osCommerce on:
http://www.azteccreations.net/
http://www.ellaelaine.com/
http://www.megguess.com/