Posted by Phillip Oertel on 10/24/05 17:51

hi,

i want to create a "shop server" application. the shop client interface
will be in flash (communication with php over xml, soap or amfphp), the
administration interface will be html. most likely it will probably be a
long-running application that will be extended in several steps, so we
need a solid foundation. we also need to get started quickly (who
doesn't), otherwise i would consider starting from scratch.

i have already looked around quite a lot for a nicely adaptable
shop/ecommerce implementation, but haven't been very successful so far.
everything i found was conceived in php4 times, where OO wasn't as
wide-spread in the php community as it is today. some of the packages
are poorly documented (both in-code and separate documentation), have an
inconsistent coding style, are dead, are copies of oscommerce with a
worse interface, ...

feature-wise the best i found was xtcommerce (oscommerce fork)
admin interface wise: zencart (oscommerce fork)
code-wise: randshop
non of them use php5's features, though, none are written object-oriented.

i have no info on the performance of these shops, although that
shouldn't be a prob as long as it's not desastrous (to some extend, you
can always scale hardware-wise).

so i am looking for a cleanly layered application where i could swap out
the presentation layer. and all important shop data (products, product
categories, cart, etc.) should be represented as objects, so i could
extend them to implement required customizations.
it would be a big plus if the admin interface was well thought-out.

we need quite some features like multiple languages, multiple
categories, discounts on certain products, payment provider integration,
customer newsletters, possibly administration of several slightly
different shops in one installation, etc.

is there such an application or am i stuck with oscommerce and its forks?
i don't need it to be feature complete, as long as there is a way to
adapt the code without hacking the whole thing (and loosing the
possibility of upgrading).

as long as the code was open, i would be happy to pay a certain amount
for the application.

anyone?

phil

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