It seems today everyone has a blog, and war over what software is better. Everyone and their brother’s mother has an opinion and which is best, but that’s another post altogether (for the record, I’ve used LiveJournal and currently utilize WordPress, and love it). Right now, I want to briefly discuss e-commerce shopping cart software.
My most recent experience has been SquirrelCart.
Squirrelcart PHP Shopping Cart software is a fully customizable, robust php shopping cart, designed with the advanced developer and web novice in mind.
That’s a mouth full.
Now, I’d like to point out that I wasn’t using the latest and greatest. Nor was I using untouched code, so I can’t fully comment on the software or the quality of its code - but I can comment on the quality of the prior developer, and the usefulness of subversion content repositories for any business.
When I entered the game for Client X, it was a lot of little tweaks here and there. It was fixing up code and optimization. Simple tasks, until I started looking at the code (and by all means I can’t take the credit, I work with some bad-ass developers that I get to bounce ideas off of).
The Good:
They commented the hell out of the code! TONS of comments. Personalization’s well labeled. Identifiers all over the place.
The Bad:
Only bad thing about the comments - he listed the changes made to files, but they were meaningless. “Changed C for Y to do Z” is useless if I can’t see what was changed or for what. That’s where a good SVN comes in. A lot of bad code. Bad math. Functions being called and executed that did nothing or returned nothing of value. Recursion. A TON of edits to account for bugs. A lot of ‘hacks’ that were seemingly done because the previous developer didn’t know why he needed them.
The Ugly:
A ton of the hacks put in place were fixed in subsequent upgrades of SquirrelCart - security considerations, optimizations, compatibilities - except now I was no longer working with solid software. I was working with second-hand code, customized and tweaked, so an upgrade could totally break the site.
The Bonus:
SquirrelCart’s support and staff are bad-ass. I still think it’s a one-man shop - but the documentation is well-done and every e-mail and question was quickly answered (accurately & politely). That makes it a winner, and I’ve considered sending some business their way
Magento - E-Commerce Platform for Growth
…and it’s open source!
Magento E-commerce Software was mentioned to me by Toby one day. As I haven’t developed on it (yet) I can’t call it any real pros and cons as I did with working on second-hand code above.
The Good:
Open source! Excellent blog with useful tidbits. Constantly trying to keep its community “in the know” and it shows. Their code seems to be structured where it’s easier to add on to the package, instead of editing core files- something I encountered in other projects. Extend your platform, don’t override it, that way you can upgrade with ease!
The Bad:
Open source scares people. People feel like if it’s open, it’s more vulnerable (because hackers can get to the core code, they can more easily exploit it - which is true of bad code - from what I’ve seen so far, Magento is lacking in the “been hacked” area). They also feel like if they get it for free it’s just not as powerful as paid software.
The Bonus:
Open source! They’re on Twitter! And you all know how much people whine and complain on there - so it’s a good sign they’re monitoring word on their stuff (and when you’ve got an open-source project that relies on people paying you for support rather than your software, word is everything!)
All in all, I’m hoping to create a site utilizing Magento - but as usual, side projects often get thrown aside for school work and paid work, so a future of an affair with Magento may be a ways off for now :-/
