Platforms & Shopping Carts
Using WordPress for Ecommerce, Part Three: CSS Grid, Home Page Design
Responsive site designs that adapt to a user's device are a keystone of good web work in 2012. Responsive design, however, can and does add a level of complexity and some extra work as the web worker needs to create additional graphic designs, st...
Using WordPress for Ecommerce, Part Two: Logo and Color Palette
Whether a site is displayed on a smartphone, a desktop, or a television, how it looks will affect how much visitors trust and respect it. With this in mind, planning and executing a graphic design should be one of the first steps in a web develo...
Installing Magento Community Edition on an Ubuntu LAMP Stack
The popular Magento ecommerce platform is built to run on a Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack and installing it on Ubuntu 11.11 takes just a few simple commands. At the time of writing, the most recent version of Magento's free Community Edi...
Using WordPress for Ecommerce, Part One: Defining the Project
WordPress, the popular, open-source content management system, can be a good choice for developing ecommerce sites. This article is the first in an Ecommerce Developer series that will describe in some detail how to use WordPress to develop an ec...
17 New Magento Tutorials
The Magento open source ecommerce platform has an installed user-base of over 100,000 merchants. Magento supports an active developer community and a frequent stream of helpful tutorials. Here is a list of recent tutorials for Magento. There are...
Analyzing Open-Source Ecommerce Platforms: Part 11 TomatoCart
TomatoCart is a free, PHP-based, open-source ecommerce platform that features an Ajax administration panel, very capable reporting and analytics, and a rich user experience. This review of TomatoCart is part of my ongoing series of articles inten...
A Checklist for OpenCart Launches
After 16 years of website building, I think I know enough to launch a site with complete confidence, knowing I have performed all the necessary configurations. Unfortunately, the reality is that despite my own self-confidence, I always miss someth...
29 New WordPress Tutorials
WordPress is a highly customizable platform. But tailoring a WordPress site to fit your needs still takes work. Fortunately, there is always a steady stream of new WordPress tutorials to help. Here is a list of recent WordPress tutorials. There...
Analyzing Open-Source Ecommerce Platforms, Part 10: Zeuscart
Zeuscart is a free, open-source, PHP-based ecommerce platform available under a GNU license. The platform provides many important features including support for digital products. This review of Zeuscart is part of an ongoing series of articles me...
Analyzing Open-Source Ecommerce Platforms, Part 9: jCart
Free and open source, jCart is a shopping cart based on PHP and jQuery. It can be added to an existing website with ease, enabling an Ajax-driven user experience and PayPal integration. This review of jCart is the ninth installment in a series of...
Localizing OpenCart for Language, Currency
OpenCart 1.5 comes with the capability to support multiple languages, currencies and other localization features. However, the standard installation only includes one language: English. Furthermore, the British heritage of OpenCart's developer, Da...
Analyzing Open-Source Ecommerce Platforms, Part 8: Spree
Spree is a Ruby-on-Rails-powered open source ecommerce platform known for providing excellent backend structure and exceptional frontend flexibility. This review of Spree is the eighth installment in a series of articles that provide a brief anal...
27 OpenCart Tools and Tutorials
It’s easy to understand why OpenCart is a popular ecommerce platform. Feature-rich "out of the box,” OpenCart helps developers get merchants up and running at a minimal cost. Here is a list of tools and tutorials for OpenCart. There are tools to ...
Understanding OpenCart Layouts
In version 1.5 of OpenCart, the developers have helped those of us who have, in the past, found it a bit difficult to isolate and manipulate page layouts. With the addition of a new backend menu, we can now begin to get a handle on how to use temp...
New Developer Tools on Windows Phone App Hub
The new Windows Phone operating system, code-named “Mango,” is now available for developers on App Hub, the developer portal to manage your account, find tools and resources, and submit applications. For the Mango release, App Hub has been updat...
Analyzing Open-Source Ecommerce Platforms, Part 7: PrestaShop
PrestaShop is a free, open-source ecommerce platform with more than 90,000 sites built on it, according to its creators. The solution has a very flexible theme-based design that makes it easy to customize and an extensive list of features and av...
Styling OpenCart 1.5
In my previous article, "Tweaking OpenCart 1.5 Layouts," I showed you how to create a new, revised instance of the default theme installed with OpenCart 1.5, and how to modify the footer. Now that we have some understanding as to how OpenCart them...
Analyzing Open-Source Ecommerce Platforms, Part 6: Magento
Magento is one of the most popular open-source ecommerce platforms, with more than 100,000 active merchants and a solid brand name in the ecommerce community. Many large retailers use Magento, such as The North Face; Olympus; and Dockers. ...
Tools and Resources on Twitter’s New Developer Site
Twitter’s new developer site, Dev.twitter.com, provides fresh support for the Twitter community and its over one million registered applications. The site should help to improve the microblogging company’s strained relationship with its third-par...
Analyzing Open-Source Ecommerce Platforms, Part 5: osCommerce
osCommerce is a PHP-based, open source ecommerce platform that has eleven years of continued development, a large community, and more than 12,000 live stores to its credit. Harold Ponce de Leon is osCommerce's lead developer and original creator....