Re: online shop
Posted: 01 Jan 2012, 13:04
At the risk of dredging up an old thread, I took the plunge into OpenCart this week.
I've been using ZenCart for the last five years and it's served its purpose but, with the likelihood that the next upgrade will require a *lot* of work, I've been looking elsewhere. At the recommendation of this thread, I tried out OpenCart.
In comparison of the two, the first thing I can say is that OpenCart is significantly easier to set up. ZenCart has one heck of a lot of options in the back-end, but it's so disorganised that finding anything is a task in itself. You can be pretty sure that if you want it to do something it will be able to do it, but finding out how to do it is the chore.
OpenCart, however, has a much more simplified back-end. You can find what it can do much easier. Even though I've had to manually migrate my products and options, it wasn't an arduous task. Migrating my customer base took a little bit of fiddling with CSVs but that was also do-able.
The front-end of OpenCart, without custom template, is much more modern and fresh compared to ZenCart - ZenCart feels very antiquated in comparison.
I haven't yet got onto looking outside the envelope of OpenCart (I've only been using it for a week), so I don't know what trouble I might have customising the template or adding international shipping options or other couriers, but it looks like this might be an easier task than it was with ZenCart.
The only real downside with OpenCart is the same thing you get with all free solutions - support. Yes, there is a support forum but the developer of OpenCart doesn't appear to be the most sociable person around. If you have find a problem that doesn't directly affect the developer's use of OpenCart, he's not all that interested in working out a fix. If you're lucky, someone else may have run into the same problem and posted a fix but, if not, you're on your own.
I found a couple of "bugs" myself while setting OpenCart up. One such problem was that emails sent out by OpenCart would not display images in the emails when viewed with the Mozilla Thunderbird / Seamonkey email clients - or, in one case, the iPad email client. This problem has been discussed on the OpenCart forum, but the only replies tended to be "use a different email client" or "I see the images fine" from the developer. That's avoiding the problem, it's not a solution. I'm far from being a coder but I did eventually find the problems - and they were minor things. In one case a hyphen was missing deep within the code. In the other case, a slightly different bug in a different email code needed to be altered. I fixed those for myself and now it's working fine, but who else is going to wade through code for hours trying to find a solution? No one, judging by the posts of faults on the forum.
This is to be expected because OpenCart is still relatively new, and there is really just one person developing it. ZenCart has more people working on it, but it suffers from the "too many cooks" problem - too many people developing too many things leads to messy code and files all over the place. Your take your choice which issue you want.
My own choice for now is OpenCart because it doesn't seem to have stagnated in the way ZenCart has and, well, I see myself as a problem hunter/solver anyway. I hate hunting for bugs, but I love it when I solve the problem. I'd guess that not many of us are like that.
I've been using ZenCart for the last five years and it's served its purpose but, with the likelihood that the next upgrade will require a *lot* of work, I've been looking elsewhere. At the recommendation of this thread, I tried out OpenCart.
In comparison of the two, the first thing I can say is that OpenCart is significantly easier to set up. ZenCart has one heck of a lot of options in the back-end, but it's so disorganised that finding anything is a task in itself. You can be pretty sure that if you want it to do something it will be able to do it, but finding out how to do it is the chore.
OpenCart, however, has a much more simplified back-end. You can find what it can do much easier. Even though I've had to manually migrate my products and options, it wasn't an arduous task. Migrating my customer base took a little bit of fiddling with CSVs but that was also do-able.
The front-end of OpenCart, without custom template, is much more modern and fresh compared to ZenCart - ZenCart feels very antiquated in comparison.
I haven't yet got onto looking outside the envelope of OpenCart (I've only been using it for a week), so I don't know what trouble I might have customising the template or adding international shipping options or other couriers, but it looks like this might be an easier task than it was with ZenCart.
The only real downside with OpenCart is the same thing you get with all free solutions - support. Yes, there is a support forum but the developer of OpenCart doesn't appear to be the most sociable person around. If you have find a problem that doesn't directly affect the developer's use of OpenCart, he's not all that interested in working out a fix. If you're lucky, someone else may have run into the same problem and posted a fix but, if not, you're on your own.
I found a couple of "bugs" myself while setting OpenCart up. One such problem was that emails sent out by OpenCart would not display images in the emails when viewed with the Mozilla Thunderbird / Seamonkey email clients - or, in one case, the iPad email client. This problem has been discussed on the OpenCart forum, but the only replies tended to be "use a different email client" or "I see the images fine" from the developer. That's avoiding the problem, it's not a solution. I'm far from being a coder but I did eventually find the problems - and they were minor things. In one case a hyphen was missing deep within the code. In the other case, a slightly different bug in a different email code needed to be altered. I fixed those for myself and now it's working fine, but who else is going to wade through code for hours trying to find a solution? No one, judging by the posts of faults on the forum.
This is to be expected because OpenCart is still relatively new, and there is really just one person developing it. ZenCart has more people working on it, but it suffers from the "too many cooks" problem - too many people developing too many things leads to messy code and files all over the place. Your take your choice which issue you want.
My own choice for now is OpenCart because it doesn't seem to have stagnated in the way ZenCart has and, well, I see myself as a problem hunter/solver anyway. I hate hunting for bugs, but I love it when I solve the problem. I'd guess that not many of us are like that.
