[thelist] Re: x-cart vs zen-cart

[Ron Dorman]

Darin Lang wrote:

> I have used Zen Cart and found it to have great support and a large 
> active developer community that is in the progress of addressing these 
> few complaints mentioned, about tables being incorporated in the 
> output and messing up the pure CSS template. I found it far more 
> flexible and easier than x-cart, cube cart, fish cart, oss commerce, 
> miva, shopsite and any of the other carts i have used over the years.
> Zen cart is incredibly customizable, and easy to get up and running 
> with. You can see two zen cart stores at the link below, one 
> wholesale, one retail. 

I am in the middle of my first Zen Cart site. I have found it to be an 
easy installation, and after a week of reading the support forums and 
FAQS to understand the design, fairly easy to modify. I researched in 
the forums, each mod needed as I came to it in the production plan (stay 
focused) and we are close to a production site in a week (the client 
already had most of the graphics ready and started uploading as soon as 
I had Zen Cart functional).

While the templating system is rolled by Zen Cart (instead of using 
Smarty or other popular templating engine), it provides for template 
overrides for your customizations. You simply create a template 
directory with whatever name you want, copy the default template file 
you need to change into your directory and modify to your hearts 
content. The sweet part is when you upgrade (good one coming soon), your 
mods stay in place. The only thing you need to do is run diff's on the 
new files and your modified files to see if there is anything you need 
to add to your mod files for new features.

Zen Cart is going to be non-table, xhtml/css within the not too distant 
future. It is currently xhtml 1.0 Transitional by code but I have not 
yet begun validation tests on this new site so I don't know how well it 
validates.

You can see the work-in-progress at toddbloom.com (a client domain/URL 
so everyone be considerate) for another example of what can be done. 
While not finished with presentation/layout, the site is fully 
functional and will charge credit cards if you take it that far.

Ron D.

-- 
Ron Dorman
Simply Digital Technologies
www.simplydigtech.net
rwd at simplydigtech.net
817-503-7704 ofc
817-503-7719 fax
817-528-8947 cell