OSCommerce vs. Zen-Cart part II
Ok, so now after fiddling around with both installs of OSCommerce and Zen Cart I think I’ve come to a conclusion of which open source cart I will use for my little e-commerce store (a few outrageously good graphic designers and I are going to be selling custom T-Shirts), and the choice I’ve made is OSCommerce. Yes, I realize that Zen-Cart is a great open-source cart with an active community and has an infinitely better admin interface. My choice came down to 3 points, going from most important to least important:
1. Layout, layout, layout!
I know my way around a stylesheet and CSS is definitely in my blood, but going through either Zen-Cart or OSCommerce page layouts is a nothing short of a nightmare. Keep in mind that I’m biased because I use Drupal and mass changes are exponentially easier to do with that CMS. First of all the default installs of both the carts are done with tables, dreaded dreaded tables, and second both require changes to tons of individual files to keep the formatting the same. I know I could use the mass find and replace feature, but there is something nice about changing one template file and being confident that it’s fixed everywhere. So point being, I chose OSCommerce because I just liked the layout better. To each his own, but I figured that the layout was going to be the most difficult part of the whole project so why add sleepless nights to mass altering a layout when I don’t have to.
2. Contributions and add-ons
I highly recommend going through both contribution lists in OSCommerce and Zen-Cart. In the end the contributions are going to make a world of differnence with your ecommerce site, and it’s best to figure out ahead of time which ones you will absolutely need in your site. I mean can you picture yourself after a month of developing only to find that you have to write in php and learn mysql to complete your site. Ouch!
3. Documentation
It’s all in the details my friend. Documentation is huge! I’m not talking about forums where you ask a question and then get a half-ass answer from someone that is wayyyyy to bored. I’m talking about good old, step-by-step tutorials. OSCommerce has Zen-Cart beat here, even if the documentation is from 2003 sometimes.
So that is why, in a nutshell, why I’ve chosen to use OSCommerce for my little ecommerce site. I’m still going to merge it with Drupal, because I love Drupal, I just haven’t figured out how yet.
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April 25th, 2007 at 6:45 pm |
I’m not sure where you got your info, but zen cart isn’t all table based. the template I use is all css, and not that difficult to change if you know css as well as you say.
Have you tried using firefox with the web developer add-on? it can show you the div or class info which will make editing your templates much easier.
As for osc, I tried it and just searching through the contributions was a nightmare with everybody trying to change the contribution without knowing exactly what they were doing. You’ll see comments stating, and I quote, “Don’t use this cause the last guy that changed it was an idiot!”. That’s simply not something you want to see when you’re trying to build a professional cart.
Zen Cart was not only easy to install, but it was easy to edit once you understand the organization of the template override system, which is something I understand oscommerce lacks.
Take another look at Zen Cart. You owe it to your readers.
May 24th, 2007 at 7:47 pm |
I agree with John.
I have been using OSCommerce for two years, it is great. Are going to change to ZenCart asap, because:
Better code, uses div’s instead of tables
Separate template, not design and logic in a total mess
ZenCart have the funtionality of OSCommerce with many modules installed and seems to work.
Discounts is supported in ZenCart, not OSCommerce, there is comtributions that do not work properly.
In short: Take OSCommerce and clean it up, add many of the good contributions and improve them further and you have ZenCart.
Both platforms are great. But why not choose the best of them?
/Fredrik
August 7th, 2007 at 4:34 pm |
I know you’re comparing OSC and ZenC, but since you threw Drupal in there, I’d like to mention what -not- to opt for: Drupal E-Commerce. I’ve been struggling with this module with slow and partial success. I’m now looking at OSC and ZenC to evaluate whether their Drupal integration issues are easier to live with than Drupal E-Commerce’s difficulties.
September 18th, 2007 at 7:30 am |
We use osCommerce due to it’s wealth of contributions; We don’t have the skills to develop everything ourselves so we need a crutch. You can also use STS (Simple Template System) with it which effectively gives you a templating system akin to PHP Template in Drupal (it uses placeholders like $breadcrumb and allows you to use any HTML/CSS template you like).
We looked at zencart but thought it best to stay with osCommerce for compatibility with contributions.
Now, the real point of my post. I have been using Ubercart › http://ubercart.org and it’s so nice! It’s based on osCommerce so has a lot of the bases covered out of the box (plus more useful features). The thing that we (the Ubercart community) need is contributions porting to Ubercart/Drupal. So, if you’re intested, check it out and see if you can help.
December 7th, 2007 at 2:25 am |
I have been using OsCommerce for about a year now. When I was choosing carts, I could not really see what made Zen Cart so much better. After getting experience with OsCommerce, the advantages of Zen Cart are more apparent. If you compare the common files between the two packages, they noticably similar, but they have some stark differences. For one, there are a lot useful of changes to the organization of the code. Zen Cart has streamlined the order.php class by moving code in from other files so that order.php handles all order function. Interaction with MySQL is handled by an object instead of tep_whatever functions. The payment modules are also better, and come pre-built to record gateway response information -though I will build it to write to a different table. I had to do a lot of modification to OsCommerce to get it to do discounts, and Zen Cart has that pre-built. The HTML in OsCommerce is a little bit archaic, which was alright for me, but I have since gotten used to using XHTML and CSS which I find to be much more powerful. In hindsight, if I would have known these things before hand, I would have used Zen Cart from the beginning.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:57 pm |
Hi
I came across your note about why you chose occommerce, and you mention documentation - where can one get documentation?
thanks
Karen