So I've been following tutorials from
http://www.webspeaks.in/2010/07/create-your-first-magento-module.html?showComment=1331751126549#c2304517526193268399
and
How to create a simple 'Hello World' module in Magento?
I have some basic understanding but what I'm really trying to do is just make a text area box that can store information to the database. One is a comment box for the payment information and another is a notes area regarding clients. Any links or tutorials will help, thank you!
There are heaps of thorough resources, blog posts, and of course Stack Overflow.
Here's a list of my favorites:
alanstorm.com - Alan is a notorious developer who has contributed a lot to the Magento community. Also, his Magento Quickies tumblr is sweet.
aschroder.com - A Kiwi who must've cloned himself to do all of the things that he's done.
www.fabrizio-branca.de Fabrizio is another tireless worker in the Magento world, and he shares lots of information about Magento and Typo3 on his blog.
inchoo.com - Inchoo are a Croatian development firm, and they have been deciphering the framework and posting information to all for several years.
magebase.com - A collection of Magento developers who put out posts that can help out quite a bit
Magento Knowledgebase - Magento has a full knowledgebase, and Alan Storm's developers series is a must-read for folks new to the frameowrk
Magento U - Magento recognized that they needed to get more information out there, so you can get the Fundamentals of Magento development course for free or take it in-person
Stack Overflow Magento Questions - One of my favorites!
The codebase - There's no learning without firing up your IDE and stepping through things.
Have fun. Magento is distinct!
There really is no such thing as 'simple' in Magento. That being said it is a very consistent MVC architected system, allowing for extension and overriding to achieve the system you want.
I have found that one of the best resources for learning Magento development is Alan Storm.
Another good resource is Pierre Fay, Pierre's target is creating a Magento Plugin from start to finish, but it gives you a good view of the internals of Magento.
I find new info on Magento development every day, just by googling certain features.
Enjoy!
Related
I will start a little project with a shopping cart. I will need to make several modifications in the shopping cart.
So my question is "Which is the best PHP open source Shopping Cart" to work with and easy to modify.
Give me some clues.
Best Regards,
Prestashop
Having worked with virtually all major open source e-commerce platforms, this is by far my favorite. It's not as powerful as Magento, but it's very easy to learn how it works, create/modify modules and design templates. There's also a very active community and it's developed by a company that releases it as OpenSource, so it's being constantly improved. The new flagship version 1.4 is almost out (it's at RC5 right now).
Other alternatives are:
Magento: It's built using the Zend Framework and it's heavily MVC. If you're familiar with the Zend Framework, this might be a good solution for you. It's a lot more difficult and has a much steeper learning curve than PrestaShop.
TomatoCart: This is a fork of osCommerce 3.0 beta. The creators have tried hard to improve the platform, but osCommerce has a lot of rotten design and it's a mess to extend. I've tried creating a couple of modules and had many problems. There isn't much documentation to help you and the community is not very active.
VirtueMart: If you are familiar with Joomla, this might be an option. If you're not, you should stay away because you might have a few problems setting everything up correctly and integrate this component with your template.
osCommerce: Just stay away from this...
Magento is an easy leader at the moment. It's got lot's of up-to-date features and an easy to modify architecture. The downside that I've seen mentioned in other forums is that it's more suitable for technically minded people so might not be good for a beginner.
Zen Cart
I've built a few (3 or 4ish) sites using zen cart. It's free, and it does waaaaaay more than anything I've ever needed it to do.
I've also used Squirrel cart. It's not free ($170), but it is easy to implement and has great support.
I have used both Magento and OpenCart and I can say that Magento wins hands down in terms of :
available extensions and modules
search engine optimization
wide store management possibilities including products’ comparison
wish lists and smart customer accounts.
Effective multiple store management is Magento considerable advantage.
Concerning Open Cart, it has some benefits in terms of easy installation, as it's quite lightweight in comparison to Magento.
If you are planning little business without rapid development in the near future, OpenCart will be quite enough for you.
Magento is really demanding in terms of hosting, investment, efforts, so it better suits large size stores.
Like said above OpenCart is lightweight and simple to use.. recommended more for small stores and beginners..
Magento is way ahead and has larger extensions than opencart. magento is more technical to use.
I've spent a while searching around with google but come up with a relative blank.
Having just quit my day job (!!) I'm going to spend the next few months writing a very specific ecommerce website. Due to the nature of the site, using an existing package like Mage is out of the question, so I'm going to dust off my programming hat and get stuck in with Code Igniter.
I realise there's a cart and session class already, but I was just wondering if anyone had put together a simple ecommerce / member wireframe so I don't have to reinvent the wheel.
From all my googling I've only really found totalshopuk, but that's a bit too feature rich (and, with respect, not that well written.)
I've also come across http://www.kaydoo.co.uk/projects/backendpro which looks closer to the mark, and I'll be investigating it after I've finished this :)
Any further suggestions would be great.
Thanks.
Well, I faced the same problem half a year ago - making some specific ecommerce solutions and still maintaining some features like membership handling, CMS features and a lot of extras in the form of frontend visual effect and features. The CMS part and frontend request came a little late in the the developing process, but as a developer you probably already know how that works ;)
I started my editor and went on whacking in CI. I'm a big fan of CI, but got a bit tired of reinventing the wheel (as you put it yourself) for almost every feature asked for. I started looking around for alternatives which could help me develop fast and get easy profit, but EllisLab (the people behind CI) already had something great: ExpressionEngine - which is a fairly large CMS with all the features you need to start a complex eCommerce site. Best part? It's based on CodeIgniter and it's the same structure, libraries (and so on) when developing addons and extensions for ExpressionEngine.
Although it could seem a bit pricy, it didn't take me more then 3-4 hours developing for the customer before having paid for the license.
The main reason I recommend EE is that it's based on a framework I've worked with for so long that it doesn't take long to develop something extra for my customers.
eCommerce module is free for download and is easy to modify for your needs. Membership management is already integrated into EE.
For while now I have been using ezpublish as a framework, and CMS when my web projects are based on PHP, and I must say, I have grown accustomed to it because of its flexibility for most scenarios.
However, I've had to build e-commerce sites now and then, and ezpublish includes a webshop that caters for the e-commerce needs of your installation, and of-course with all the tools you need to extend, should you need to.
Is it worthwhile and optimal to use the inbuilt webshop for an e-commerce solution, or should I rather go with an all out e-commerce solution like Magento, which has made a significant impact in that sector?
Some have made the choice of using both solutions, connected with each other ( www.ezgento.org ). Can be achieved mostly due to the very open architecture of eZ Publish. I do not have enough insight on the Magento side, so i can not tell whether it is easily "pluggable" too.
I know for fact that some ez Publish Community members are building large-scale e-shops with eZ Publish, either as a pure Content Management tool, serving content and only content to dedicated ecommerce tools, either as an integrated solution, then relying on the built-in webshop module.
I am sure you would get a fruitful discussion if asking your question directly in eZ Publish's community : http://share.ez.no/forums
Hope it helps,
Cheers,
Magento is great. It's chock full of features that you would normally pay a lot of money for in a shopping cart (or spend an eternity implementing yourself). Mostly anything you don't have in the base installation you can get from the community.
But it's extremely complicated. Expect to step a lot of time setting up your store, as the default install is not ready to go. Expect to spend time adding a template, which will take much longer than you expect. Expect to stretch your PHP skills in ways that you cannot anticipate.
Generally, Magento is not the "fast" option, nor the "easy" one, just the good one. If none of that dissuades you, it's a great option :)
Hope that helps. Thanks,
Joe
eZ Publish has Payment Gateways
It allows you to define precisely segment you category/products/prices/taxes/currencies in a flexible way
it is secure
eZ's technology is based on Open Standards and XML, which means that eZ Publish integrates natively with most of the payment gateways, as well as with many leading CRM and ERP solutions like Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Microsoft Navision or SAP.
It integrates with Online Marketing Suites in order to segment customers and provide advanced content-centric analytics
eZ Find, built on top of Lucene/solR, gives backthe relevancy of search results, and providing new ways of navigating content (facets, etc.)
It has a good cache system
See official pres about eZ Publish + eCommerce for more infos
I'd have thought this would be a native feature (seeing as joomla allows you to connect contacts with user accounts) but we can't find any way to do this!
Does anyone know of any extensions/modules that would allow this?
I'm not so hot on PHP so i'd really love to not have to code this by hand!
This is an old thread, but since it is still opened maybe you haven't found a solution yet. I faced the same problem myself and I think having the ability to manage contacts from the frontend is an essential feature for Joomla! to become more usable as a simple webapp creation tool.
Anyway, there are a couple of extensions that might help you out. However, both are commercial and don't support Joomla! 1.6. Here they are:
Front-edit address book: simple
interface. Note, however, that there
might be a security issue with
it. Google "front-edit address book exploits" and you shall find it (sorry, stackoverflow lets me post a max of 2 links per thread since I'm a new user). I emailed the developer and he assured me that the problem was already fixed, though.
Grumpy contacts: on the demo site (there's a link at the page I pointed you to), it looked a little messy to my taste. In the Joomla! Extensions Directory, however, it has good reviews.
I never used any of those since all my projects are already migrated to Joomla! 1.6.
If you found another alternative in the meantime or even developed something yourself, please let me know.
Do you try in the user menu?
Another option would be install Community Builder.
Good luck!
Contacts in Joomla are handled by the builtin com_contacts compoment which provides basic functionality for adding contacts and some basic info from the back-end.
QContacts is a wonderful extension which gives you some more control over the data you can provide, but still no front-end support.
Unfortunately I am tackling this issue as well and it turns out there are no real out-of-the-box options for supporting front-end editing of contact details.
I am looking for a good eCommerce CMS.
I need to be able to sell services and products, it must be open source that it can be customised wherever needed.
I am very familiar with PHP and Mysql, and somewhat familiar with python and ruby, so a PHP solution would be preferred.
Some of the best PHP carts:
Magento - Full featured. Excellent code quality. Hard to learn. Requires lots of server resources.
PrestaShop - PrestaShop is currently used by 250,000 shops worldwide and is available in 60 different languages.
OpenCart - OpenCart comes with an inbuilt Affiliate system, where affiliates can promote specific products and get paid for this.
InterSpire - Not Free.
FoxyCart - Not Free. Hosted checkout that uses your templates. Works well with a CMS like Modx or Expression Engine.
LemonStand - Not Free.
I have two recommendations for you.
Dont use OSCommerce.
Dont use XTCommerce which is based on OSCommerce
To be more specific NEVER EVER use oscommerce for ANY project you want to extend at all. If you run the project 100% out-of-box and need some payment extension that nobody features consider it for two seconds but then better DONT. OSCommerce features code from 2001. OSCommerce has only one coding pattern which is FIXHACKCOPYQUICKPASTEHERENOW. Its the negation of everything you think to know from software development and project mangement. If you use OSCommerce and try to extend it your project will need twice as long and you will start hating webdevelopment. And yes i know it sounds like, but i am not kidding. Been there, done that.
If anybody tells you to use oscommerce - e.g. for all the existing extentions that are out there - stand up and leave the room.
Extra Tipps:
Magento IS SLOW.
http://www.prestashop.com/ - In the OSS world Prestashop has some popularity.
http://www.interspire.com/shoppingcart/ has some reputation but is not OSS.
I know you want to stick with Linux based but nopCommerce is amazing:
http://www.nopcommerce.com/
http://demo.nopcommerce.com/
For free you can't beat this.
Try Magento
Have you checked
http://www.oscommerce.com/
It was discussed here also:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/143656/whats-the-best-free-and-opensource-php-ecommerce-solution-and-why
Regards
oscommerce- basically many features that you want, they have it. Only thing is it is in plugin format, you need to go to their forum to find the plugin to install.
I would recommend below:
interspire shopping cart- one of the most user friendly cart. Not free, but quality is there. I personally love this a lot.
Magento- is the open source software. Very good quality and functionality. BUT BUT BUT, eat up lot of server memory. If you want to go for this, start from semi dedicated server is your choice.