Best Shopping Cart To Use as a Base?

[consultant1027]

We have an e-commerce site built from ground up with PERL.  Lots of ad-hoc changes over the years so the code is heavily customized to the niche industry of the site, but not very optimized/well-organized and lacks some features. We want to convert our current E-commerce site from PERL to PHP, re-code much of it for better organization/efficiency and improve/add a lot of features (gift registry, better coupon issuance/acceptance, complex discounting rules, tighter integration with PayPal and Google Checkout, just to name a few). Instead of re-inventing the wheel on some of thee features we'd like to just take an existing modifiable PHP-based package and merge it's features with our own niche-specific features.

 

After some considerable research, I decided on X-cart. I'm about 60% done with merging the code between the two systems and frankly, even as a fairly seasoned PHP coder, I've found X-cart's code to be unecessarily convoluted in places, especially for the checkout process, let alone the design of the checkout process shows that not a lot of knowledge on maximizing sales conversions was applied to the design. So we are heavily modifying the checkout process (amongst other areas of the code) and it's been a pain as the coding is organized in a fairly unintuitive mish-mash kind of way in my opinion although I realize that is to make the application flexible and modular so it can accept third party modules easily.

 

Then, there's the dealing with updates now that we've modified it. We've figured out the utility to use to identify what's been modified so on the files we have customize we can manually patch them. The thing is, these updates seem to have a lot of security patches.

 

So now I'm thinking, is it such a good idea to build a mid-tier e-commerce site based on such a widely distributed product instead of a fully custom product or lesser known cart-engine that won't draw the attention of so many hackers? (Not that coding from scratch won't have any security bugs.) But again, these features such as gift registry, conditional discounting, robust coupons/gift cert system (expiration dates, etc.) are pretty standard features that we don't want to waste time coding from scratch.

 

I've heard CubeCart is easier to modify as the code is more simple, which may work for us as it is lesser known than X-cart and we just want a basic base to build off of. But I've heard overall X-cart is better. I've also heard good things about CS-Cart, but it sounds like it may actually be a little more difficult to customize the code than X-cart? Not sure.  And finally I'm hearing good things about Viacart.

 

Anyone have experience hacking up the code for X-cart and one of these other carts.  Is X-cart still the best way to go considering my objectives?

 

My gut is saying, we probably should just stick with X-cart, but I want to perform a reality check with people with similar objectives and experiences out there before investing a lot more time into hacking up X-cart.

 

Thanks.

[thetar]

with know how, sazcart ( www.sazcart.com ) is a great 'base' being simple, powerful, and secure.. but very easy to customize, and do just about anything that needs doing with.