So you are about to set up a new on-line store or are you thinking about revamping your current e-commerce site? If you do, think of Zen Cart!
It is well known that Zen Cart is one of the many osCommerce forks in the market. It started in June 2003 and since then it has been making its own path becoming one of the best open source e-commerce solutions you will find. There are two major reasons to affirm this:
- There is an active and committed group of developers maintaining the core system
- It has -in my opinion- the best template system you could ask for
Of course that there is more: a very active community that produces new contributions and keep existing ones updated, active community forums, an excellent book (a must have I might say) that explains with great deal of detail every aspect of an out of the box Zen Cart installation, and more. Nevertheless I decided to focus on those two items that made me choose this system over any other.
Without going into a list of the different osCommerce forks available I will say that many of them are nothing but an out of the box osCommerce with several most commonly used contributions added. Some of them have put some makeup in the back-end and that's it.
Zen Cart project team on the other side has done a great job not only improving the back-end, but also providing the front-end with a very solid template system that allows for incredible fine customization without having to touch one single line of core code. Custom made themes are files residing in their own directories located in key places that override default behavior. Plus, a theme does not have necessarily provide new behavior for every box or module: each time a page is rendered Zen Cart looks for overrides, if there is any then it uses it otherwise it uses the default one.
The other major reason to choose Zen Cart is the team behind the core system. This may not seem important at first glance, but without diminishing the invaluable importance of community contribution with support and add-ons, a synergic group of developers in charge of updating the core is what keeps the project alive.
In conclusion, I personally recommend Zen Cart to anyone that is thinking about setting up a new store or migrating their existing one. And we can help you with that...