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Moving on up from OSCommerce?

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 11:10 pm
by ValEff
Hey guys, please bear with me. I'm a designer, not a developer, and have been hired to revamp a friend's mid-sized eCommerce site. My husbands' the developer - but has his own workload bearing down on him. Hence, I turn to you!

The site is http://www.scrap4life.com

In addition to a complete overhaul of the interface, we've got some major issues to deal with. The most menacing being her shopping cart, which is currently OSCommerce. I downloaded the entire site last night, and went through the code with my husband this morning - just to get his professional assesment of the situation before moving forward on my own. I won't go into detail, but he was shaking his head the whole time.

He says OSCommerce is written poorly, and that it's not a good idea to use opensource shopping carts for any eCommerce site with big plans for expansion. The owner DOES have big plans, and as you can see - she's already got a whole mess of product in the database. One of the dominant issues her site faces ATM is how sluggish (and moody) the cart is. A lot of the time, pages won't load until you refresh a few times, and certain items won't add to cart no matter how long you wait ... what's up with that??

So anyway, my hubby is telling me that I seriously need to push for a complete conversion to ASP.net. The store owner *is* willing, but it's more of an undertaking than I've got time & patience for ATM, plus there's a handful of issues on the table that require the site to be live & fully functional in the coming weeks/months. So, all things considered, I'm wondering if we should just purchase a non-opensource PHP shopping cart for the time being? And if so:

1) Which one? (pros/cons)

2) What's the best (most painless) way to transfer ALL that product over?

In addition, if anyone's bored out of their minds and wants to poke around that site, I'm SO open to suggestions! It's a mess ... she's running OSCommerce, PHPbb, and PHP PhotoPost ... all requiring seperate logins :b

Thanks in advance!!

Re: Moving on up from OSCommerce?

Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2006 12:46 am
by Benjamin
ValEff wrote: In addition to a complete overhaul of the interface, we've got some major issues to deal with. The most menacing being her shopping cart, which is currently OSCommerce. I downloaded the entire site last night, and went through the code with my husband this morning - just to get his professional assesment of the situation before moving forward on my own. I won't go into detail, but he was shaking his head the whole time.
I have done a lot more than shake my head when looking at the source code for osCommerce :wink:
ValEff wrote: He says OSCommerce is written poorly
It could be better. It basically has too many features crammed into it. It's all (ok mostly) procedural code, whereas PHP is moving to OOP. Earlier versions of osCommerce were actually pretty quick.
ValEff wrote: , and that it's not a good idea to use opensource shopping carts for any eCommerce site with big plans for expansion.
Why not? Open source applications are generally better than closed source. Granted osCommerce may be an exception. I personally hate working with it, but rebuilding it would take a very long time.
ValEff wrote: One of the dominant issues her site faces ATM is how sluggish (and moody) the cart is.
The easiest way to fix this would be to identify exactly what areas of the code are causing this problem and rewrite them, rather than scrapping the entire store. Is it set to store every query in the database? If so you've just doubled the number of database queries. Is MySQL properly configured? If not it's not an issue with the store.
ValEff wrote: So anyway, my hubby is telling me that I seriously need to push for a complete conversion to ASP.net.
What is that? :wink:

ValEff wrote: So, all things considered, I'm wondering if we should just purchase a non-opensource PHP shopping cart for the time being?
Good luck finding one. If you do, ask yourself whether it would be easier to fix what your client has, or modify the new store so that it has all the features your client is used to having. Then add in the time it will take you to migrate all the products, sales data, customer data etc to the new application.

Welcome to the board by the way. You'll get a lot more answers Monday. Things are kind of slow here on the weekends.

Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2006 1:07 am
by alvinphp
There is nothing wrong with open source. Linux is open source and that is just as secure as Windows. And OSCommerce could of been written better, but it works and I have implemented OSC without any of the problems you describe and that is with some heavy customization. There are also other open source carts out there like Zen Cart. And you can always buy one if you want. Switching though is going to be way more work then just fixing what you got.

And the problem has nothing to do with the language as you can have very large sites with PHP.

Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2006 1:12 am
by ValEff
Thanks for the response, guys - I'm still waving in the feedback, but I just wanted to chime in and say that we both think opensource is a fantastic concept (which is often very useful). I'm just unsure about OSC for our current needs ...

Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2006 1:24 am
by RobertGonzalez
If you visit Paypal and look at their partnered Shopping Carts and gateways, they have a heck of a list going on. osCommerce is the most popular because it is free, but there are several other low cost alternatives to osCommerce. Code wise, I haven't dug into too much code, but I would suspect anything that is predominantly OOP and ready to go PHP5 would suffice.

And I will say this, going to a .NET solution... get ready to open the pocket books and be prepared to NEVER be able to mod 'your' code. :wink:

EDIT | Not sure if it is accessible from the 'outside' but the Paypal area I mentioned is listed here --> https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/websc ... ThirdParty

Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2006 7:30 pm
by ValEff
Alright, after much research (and staying up far, far too late), I decided to stick with OSC and make the most of it.

She installed this cart in 2003, and I can only assume that its improved leaps and bounds since then ... at least I hope it has. I spent all morning cleaning up the html and css, I haven't had to deal with this many nested tables in YEARS! I'm pleased to report that the more I optimize the structure of the interface, the quicker it's loading. Thank God.

I had a huge breakthrough about an hour ago. I decided I didn't like the way the categories looked with the # of products displayed, so (with the help of my hubby) I went into the MySQL manager and set the display to false. Bam. Instantly, it was like the site got a rush of adrenalin! While most of you who are familiar with PHP and MySQL would think of something like this right off the bat, I however am not a developer, and simply don't think that way :roll:

.... until now :>

I'm stoked. The site's really coming together now! Thanks for all the insight, and please - if anyone has any other random ideas or suggestions, I'm all ears ... or eyes ... whatever 8)

Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2006 8:09 pm
by Benjamin
FYI, I'm pretty sure all of those changes (config) can be made via the osCommerce admin panel. Might want to play around in there.

Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2006 9:01 pm
by Weirdan
She installed this cart in 2003, and I can only assume that its improved leaps and bounds since then ...
Not that much as you might expect. The biggest problem with osC is its conservative community plus a weird habits of its core developers. Here's a nice example
Status: Open
Assigned To: unassigned
Created: 20th November 2004 07:03:24
Last Updated: 20th November 2004 07:11:57
Reporter: weirdan (AT) gmail (DOT) com
Version: 2.2-MS2
Type: Cross Site Scripting
PHP Version: all
That's a security related bug I reported to them almost two years ago, checked against v2.2-MS2 (current so-called 'stable'). And it's wasn't even assigned, I got no response from them and all that...