Which PHP open source shopping cart solutions have features that benefit me as the web developer?

Question

There are hundreds of shopping cart solutions available for every platform, and all hosting plans come with several already installed. As a developer I understand that most of these are fairly similar from a user perspective.

But which ones are built with the developer in mind? For example, which ones have a decent API so that my custom code doesn't get mingled with the core code or which ones have a well thought through template system so that I can easily customize it for each new client?

Answer 1

osCommerce is one of those products that was badly designed from the beginning, and becomes basically unmaintainable as time moves forward. Addons are patches, and custom code modifies core. (Unless things have drastically changed since I last looked at it - judging by the version numbers, they have not).

While probably at a bit higher level than you seem to be asking, Drupal is a very attractive platform. It is a CMS at its base, and using ecommerce or Ubercart you can turn it into a store. With modules like CCK and Views you can build very sophisticated ecommerce sites (specialized product types, attributes) with very little coding, plus you get all the CMS tools (editing, access control, etc) for free. If you write your own modules, you can hook into almost anything in Drupal without touching the core code, and you get a ton of flexibility.

Though a lot of developers may not consider it simply because they're stuck in this view that they should write something from scratch, Drupal is a really great development platform for this sort of thing. There is definitely a learning curve to it, especially when you need to write modules for it, but the time it takes to learn and implement a site is still probably less than writing a very customized ecommerce site from scratch.