php shopping carts

[cyjetsu 0]

I am new to php, in fact just about to start studying it. Mainly right now I am interested in developing shopping carts and forums and using and modifying existing ones. I have come across some shopping carts you can buy such as:

http://www.x-cart.com/

and

http://www.viart.com/

Are these worth buying? Or are they just WYSIWYG editors that are the equivalent of dreamweaver and frontpage for html. And you can hand-code php just as well or even better without these software packages.

 

I have heard lots of demand for x-cart, so would I have to buy xcart software to use xcart on client sites, or can I just use open-source scripts that are x-cart?

[ratcateme 0]

if you are going to go in depth with php and get rally good at it you could look at making your own cart that is customized for your site.

but if you need it know you could buy one of those but i would recommend building your own as it will give you lots of experience and you will get a good idea for security as you will need to make sure it is hacker proof and so on.

 

Scott.

[JonnoTheDev 19]

OS Commerce

http://www.oscommerce.com/

[cyjetsu 0]

I will start learning my own but it will take me some time before I learn it enough to build one security proof enough not to be full of holes that give access to customers credit info to unwanted persons which will result in me getting sued.

 

So I shall look at the open source ones. I have heard zencart and oscommerce are almost identical. But they seem most popular so I will look at them.

 

But I have noticed many companies use x-cart. Would I be able to modify and use xcart with clients without buying xcart software?

[DarkWater 0]

I will start learning my own but it will take me some time before I learn it enough to build one security proof enough not to be full of holes that give access to customers credit info to unwanted persons which will result in me getting sued.

 

So I shall look at the open source ones. I have heard zencart and oscommerce are almost identical. But they seem most popular so I will look at them.

 

But I have noticed many companies use x-cart. Would I be able to modify and use xcart with clients without buying xcart software?

 

Quite honestly, you shouldn't store credit card info on your server regardless of how good you are at PHP and security.  Hand it off to a third party, because when (not if) someone gets the credit card info from your database, you won't be handle the lawsuits. >_<  Also, I've never used x-cart, so I'm not sure if that violates the Terms of Use or something.  Do check out OSCommerce though to get some ideas.

[toivo 0]

VirtueMart from http://virtuemart.org is a popular Open Source shopping cart that works with Joomla.

[RichardRotterdam 1]

oscommerce is allright if you're not planning on modifying the front-end page designs a lot. These pages all use tables for layout and the shopping cart class and pages are a mess

[JonnoTheDev 19]

build one security proof enough not to be full of holes

This is a bit of a double edged sword because open source code is as it says on the tin. If someone finds a weakness in an open source application then all users of it are at risk until a patch is released and thats if users install it.

Holes have been discovered in versions of osCommerce before.