Posted by James Benson on 10/24/05 18:19

PHP5 has yet to see the maturity and stability PHP4 offers which is why
most applications use it.

Worst thing you can do is design a website in entirely flash :)






Phillip Oertel wrote:
> 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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