[thelist] Zen Cart [was Mambo - Joomla!]

[Chris Price]

On 23/11/05 1:18 pm, "Lauri Väin" <lauri_lists at tharapita.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I would shy away from Mambo (do not know whether Joomla is better). We even
> hired one original author of it for some work for us on it.
> 
> There are two kinds of problems that it has:
> 1. Technical:
> - No proper localization support (like Eike said)
> - The guy working on it said Mambo has inbuilt tables, so he could not
> migrate it to a CSS layout
> - Poor code
> - Security problems (has needed patching). Lots of things are against best
> practices.
> 
> 2. Performance (on very high load servers). It dies frequently. We have made
> some heavy caching and other modifications now. For your application,
> though, you will not have problems with this.

I can echo the performance issue and css is a problem because its tables
based. Having said that, converting to css is not that huge a hurdle.

One thing that bothers me is that wherever you are on the site you are
always on the index page + string. This is the same for Zen Cart which is a
whole lot harder to convert to css.

When I first started out in web design I had the job of working on a dynamic
site based on something called jhtml, a Java based package. The html was a
disaster but I was able to understand it (though I was a novice) because
they had successfully separated the interface from the engine so that I
could easily edit the html knowing nothing about Java.

When I build a website I write minimal html and attempt to build the design
structure using css. Php has even less to do with interface design than html
yet Zen Cart seems to inextricably tangle the php and html so that its like
picking at a huge tangled ball of string converting it to css.

Is there any open source package out there that manages to separate the
domains?

Is it possible to pull modules out of Zen Cart and attach them to html
structures that are logical rather design oriented?
-- 
Chris Price

Choctaw

chris.price at choctaw.co.uk
http://www.choctaw.co.uk