ReviewFBI

Recently, I am busy with my online shop. Because I am a fan of open sources so I turn to the powerful free resources to dig what I need.
Years ago, I witnessed the success of Oscommerces . Thus, I almost decided to use that wonderful solution. However, some friends recommended Zent card to me. They told me that Zen Cart is “ The art of e-commerce” , but I still want to get more detail.
So began the review.

Let us check out the Google Trends: people like me may search and compare them on the web; Google had no doubts to be the first station.

It seemed that the old e-mcommerce system attracted less and less attention.

How about Zen Cart ?

 It is very clear that the search is far more.

 Hmm....... Why people want to "learn more" about the Zen Cart?

Hmm.... It seemed that Zen Cart has more functions.

Now let`s get some user experiences from other webmaster :

"I have been using OSCommerce for two years, it is great. Are going to change to ZenCart asap, because:
Better code, uses div’s instead of tables
Separate template, not design and logic in a total mess
ZenCart have the funtionality of OSCommerce with many modules installed and seems to work.
Discounts is supported in ZenCart, not OSCommerce, there is comtributions that do not work properly.
In short: Take OSCommerce and clean it up, add many of the good contributions and improve them further and you have ZenCart."

I have been using OsCommerce for about a year now. When I was choosing carts, I could not really see what made Zen Cart so much better. After getting experience with OsCommerce, the advantages of Zen Cart are more apparent. If you compare the common files between the two packages, they noticably similar, but they have some stark differences. For one, there are a lot useful of changes to the organization of the code. Zen Cart has streamlined the order.php class by moving code in from other files so that order.php handles all order function. Interaction with MySQL is handled by an object instead of tep_whatever functions. The payment modules are also better, and come pre-built to record gateway response information -though I will build it to write to a different table. I had to do a lot of modification to OsCommerce to get it to do discounts, and Zen Cart has that pre-built. The HTML in OsCommerce is a little bit archaic, which was alright for me, but I have since gotten used to using XHTML and CSS which I find to be much more powerful. In hindsight, if I would have known these things before hand, I would have used Zen Cart from the beginning.

Then I search Zen Cart review on the web and Oscommerce vs Zen Cart terms, geting some info about Zen Cart developing team were most from the old oscommerce team. Here were other inportant info I got:

> Oscommerce was great system, but had no update recently years, especially after the PHP5 released
> OScommerce was the parent of other popular opensources e-commerce system.
> The documentation was a big advantage for OS-commerce while the Zen Cart had only a few.

Eventually, I make a decision to try Zen Cart, which means a OScommerces with lots of add on and contributions.

lol, I will get more insights into the Zen Cart in the next few days.