Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

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