[SLL] OSS commerce

[John Locke]

Rob Smith wrote:
> On Dec 22, 2007 10:38 AM, Bill Campbell <bill at celestial.com> wrote:
>   
>> Interesting although my initial reaction is that anything processing money
>> written in php is likely to have major security problems.
>>
>> Bill
>>     
>
> Wow, way to spread FUD...
>
> Do you have any real reason for saying so?
>   
So now we're kicking up the language wars?

PHP does not suck as a language--it's pretty great at what it does. The
problem is that a lot of PHP programmers suck... and like HTML, PHP is
quite forgiving, allowing you to make something horrendously insecure
and poorly written that still appears to work just fine. I say this as a
PHP programmer, and it's our language of choice at Freelock...

OS Commerce has plenty of problems, though it is possible to secure.
It's a nightmare to customize, however.

Much better is Zen Cart (http://www.zen-cart.com). It's very similar
from an administrator point of view--I believe it was some earlier OS
Commerce developers who got overly frustrated at the architecture (or
lack of it) in OS Commerce, and instead of forking it, started fresh
with brand new code but using what they had learned from its predecessor.

Zen Cart is crazily complicated, with a huge amount of features built in
(even more than OS Commerce). But it's quite developer-friendly, making
it easy for you to extend/customize interfaces without touching core code.

I wouldn't recommend putting either on a regular shared hosting account,
but in a reasonably locked down environment with all the dangerous PHP
settings turned off, they're among the best shopping carts out there.

Cheers,
John Locke
Freelock Computing, the Open Source for Business Solutions
http://www.freelock.com