Hello fellow php developers, Ive been working on a small project for the past 4 days and the fruits of my labour is finally paying off. I have been working on creating a unique open source e-commerce cms. Before I get all the comments about "ye there are many such systems already" let me take a few minutes of your time to explain what this cms entails. eShop will fill the gap where other systems lack as we all know some do. Features will include

• Store Front
• User Management System
• Administration Back-end
• Shopping Cart Funcionality
• Commenting System
• Payment System including COD/EFT/CC
• Payment Gateways including iVeri
• Currency Conversion with a little help from WildHoney's classes
• Templating System
• Modules
• teh miniCart
• Smooth Interactive Installation

to name a few.

eShop v1.0.1 |

It was primarily written for the South African market as we can't use PayPal here. It is still very new and well bugs tend to appear so feel free to give your criticism. This is a open source project so if you would like to lend a hand or 2 admin@w1ck3d.co.za

From what I can gather from the demo, it's quite a simple eCommerce system. I've worked with many of the most common eCommerce packages at several businesses, and they are exceedingly bloated systems that have surplus amounts of features, but the programmers were unable to handle the rapid growth and so they became difficult to work with.

I've not actually taken the time to look for more simple systems for the very fact that clients often want everything that's out there. This is, as we well know, a bad move. But clients will be clients!

What I will say is that if your eCommerce solution does not currently support coupons, then this should definitely be high up on the list of required features, in my opinion. A lot of the clients I've had to use eCommerce systems for, have explicitly specified that coupons is quite crucial -- and indeed it is, because some January time, many businesses want to sell of their unsold stock from the Christmas period, at discount prices!

I will have to download the system tomorrow to have a proper look, but let me ask the question anyway -- is the system coded using any design patterns of sorts, and if not, would you say it's difficult to build add-ons to the system, if I didn't know the system inside-out, as I don't. I think this is another crucial part to any eCommerce system, because the many big and popular ones I've worked with have been seriously lacking in that department, and much like the add-ons for vBulletin -- they end up being merely hacks.

Incidentally, welcome to the community !

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The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.

Indeed the coupon function will need to be implemented as well as the others I have mentioned the system by far not nearly completed as I plan to use the next 4 to 6 weeks to make a completely downloadable stable release. For now the checkout has been disable as well as the administrative side.

This is a very raw demo and is only there to show the "public" its progress, and tomorrow I have put time aside to meet with one of our clients to discuss from their perspective on how and what they would expect from such a product, on another note the module function is very simple. You merely create your module, and install it via the administrator panel, this will install the sql to the database and the template calls up all the active modules in the module position and viola there are your modules.

Module positions are easy to assign in your template you would just set the module position name and in the administration panel add the position name to the module you want to show there, very simple to use.

Alternatively you could also hard code it into the system, the system is very flexible and its classes and functions are easy to work through creating a module you like is as easy as 1 2 3

Hello again guys just a quick update on eShop we have a new developer going hard at work w00t, Marc is a great php developer and has an eye for detail when it comes to sorting out code to make it easy on the eyes.

Secondly since v1 we are now at v1.0.3 our 3rd beta :D currently updated are the following items:

• Currency Conversion on the fly - supports all major currencies and adding a currency is as easy as 1 2 3
• Admin backend w00t been doing some great work on this to make it as easy as possible for any person to use
• A few modules such as Latest Products, Most Viewed Product
• Contact Us system <--- why we didnt add something as easy as this earlier i dont know :D
• Product Search
• Upgraded sleek design installation system
• Code improvement
• SECURITY!
• Some improvements to the template system, even more simple to use now
• 3 MORE PAYMENT GATEWAYS w00t!
• Thumbnail creation resizing your images made easy :)
• Some javascript features to make it look fancy, no javascript? no worries

Special thanks to the team for your contribution and Marc for the alcohol that kept us going through the night!

I will be uploading the latest beta either tonight or tomorrow :D

I am unable to reach the website, but by the looks of the review Wildhoney placed, the system has some nice features and potential. Looking forward to really see the website first hand though.

Also noticed that you're going to update it to an better version. I advise you (from my experience with my own sytems and others) to put the most effort into tweaking the security and of course, the speed.

Once again, looking forward to the real deal.

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"Life is a bitch, take that bitch on a ride"

Unfortunately the server is down for upgrade (heaven knows why its taking so long). But as soon as it is up i will update the version. As for security yes it is was very high on our priority list for this beta as well as cleaning up the code(speed). We added a little mircotime feature that tells us how long it takes for the page to generate, and the before and after shows quite a difference.

By the way i forgot to mention, this first downloadble release will be v1.1.0 as every 10th version will be a stable release. This should be in about 4 to 5 weeks if all goes well. Nevertheless the onine demo will still be there updated to the latest version.

Unfortunately due to licensing problems eShop had to change its name. We feel the new name is more exciting though and brings new life into the project.



It is also now licensed under the GNU/GPL license, we are currently at v1.0.5 5 more beta's then we will have our first release :D

Now supporting 20 payment gateways and 12 shipping companies!

For 1.0.6 we are really going to concentrate on every aspect of security and also make the cms compatible with SSL features.

Please note that virtueCart runs on its own framework and this framework will be released as opensource once our first release of virtueCart is available.

Cannot connect to the site

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VillageIdiot can have my babbies ;d

I've seen alot of shopping carts in my day (to many to list...) and whilst they say don't judge a book by it's cover if you don't already have one I would recommend getting a kickass design to default it with, god knows some free scripts have HORRIBLE default skins. We programmers make things work and do cool things but the designers catch the user's attention.

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"What everyone seems to forget is that while knowledge certainly is something - it's the implementation of knowledge that brings power" - Andres Galindo.

Haha i fully agree and ye it does have a kickass default skin, 2 actually, we decided to give one web 2.0 skin and a non web 2.0 which is basicly simple css.

Orc sorry but the server where i did host it is down apparently the host went bankrupt and until i get another host(should be this week sometime) the project will stay local. If really needed i'll upload a few screen shots.

Our project team now consists of:

3x PHP developers
1x Graphic designer

Btw is there anyway a moderator can please change the topic's name from eShop to virtueCart. Thanks

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virtueCart v1.0.5 developed by WebDevSA

Sounds promising! What market are you targeting?
Before the server went down I have seen it working for about 5 mins, and it looked like I couldn't use it out of the box for the countries I live in: Netherlands and Germany.
It is opensource, but wil it also be commercial? For example I am deploying ecommerce systems, and the time and developers it needs cost a lot of money.

It's probably just me but I have something about using out of the box scripts for what I consider big projects - not saying the scripts aren't nice but it just irks me.

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"What everyone seems to forget is that while knowledge certainly is something - it's the implementation of knowledge that brings power" - Andres Galindo.

Devels our market is basicly anybody who wants an e-commerce presence online we are trying to make it so easy to use that even the most novice user would find it easy, actually u could use it for practically any country, there is language support and 20 different payment gateways im sure you will find one to be able to use. As for the licensing yes you may use it for commercial use, the only thing the license restricts you on is proclaiming it as your own we do like a little credit for the work we do

However this does not mean you cant add to it in the form of modules, more payment gateways, etc.

TlcAndres i agree i usually too wont use premade scripts for big projects i rather do my own thing. People are often sloppy with commenting on their code with irritates me.

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virtueCart v1.0.5 developed by WebDevSA

Long time no see guys, it has been a hectic month with starting at a new programming firm and all, but this has not let me not work on my little(well ye wouldnt really call it that anymore) project. So what have we been upto? Here is the list

* Added Database Class to support both MySQL and PostgreSQL
* Tell-a-friend form
* Slideshow Module added
* Fixed Login Bug
* Optimized Code
* Contact Us form
* Changed a few things on default template
* Image Gallery added to product pages
* Product Rating added to product pages
* Work started on Admin interface
* Reflect and Thumbnail functions have been updated to support more types of images
* Bug with captcha system fixed
* Added Country field to checkout form
* Few SQL injection bugs fixed
* Product Search fixed
* Description added to sub-categories
* User level access bug fixed
* Implementing template engine
* Moved page hits from flat file to database
* Bookmark function added to product pages
* Fixed session termination bug
* Latest Products module added
* Multiple currency support added
* Comment System bug fixed
* Shoutbox module has been added
* Print the product page
* Download PDF version of product page
* Product Watch functionality added
* Promotional prices function added
* Coupons added
* Wishlist added
* Lightbox effect added to product pages
* People that bought this... functionality added
* Mailing List added

Now its time for work on 1.0.7 and we will be releasing it within the next 2 weeks for any beta testers who want to play around with it and report back on bugs before we release the first stable v1.0 'Rise of the Cart'

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virtueCart v1.0.5 developed by WebDevSA

Sounds great... But I can't get to you website...

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Dingo Web Systems > http://www.dingocode.com
My Website > http://www.evanbot.com

Would like to have a look at it too, but the site is down :S

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