I’ve been developing PHP for over 6 years and have modified many sites using “out of the box” web applications such as osCommerce, phpYellow, and most recently Pinnacle Cart.
After working with all of these, I thought it would be interesting to get feedback:
What do you think about these or other applications? Are they put together logically? Are they easy to modify? Do you hate the fact that they’re not done using the OOP or even MVC approach? Not documented well? Database queries (the ones written via PHP code) or structure terrible?
Please note the name of the product/version and your thoughts.
osCommerce was a pain for me, and looks like the project is very outdated.
After working with CakePHP 1.2 and 1.3, I am convinced using the MVC approach is much cleaner and organized, and quicker to develop. It’s so much easier to figure out how the application is structured.
Pinnacle Cart has some great features but seeing a lot of database queries mixed in with html and other functions just makes me wish an application like that was better organized, it would increase productivity.
Also, why aren’t the popular applications like WordPress, Joomla!, etc. using the MVC approach?
It is not too often that I work e-commerce projects, though over the years I have had my share. The system that I would always seem to utilize as my base was osCommerce, and while it did get the job done after loads of customizations, I always felt it was awkward to work with and a bit dated in terms of system architecture.
It’s been a running joke for quite a long time now that osCommerce is one of the worst and most consistently ugly code bases regularly encountered by PHP developers.
osCommerce 3.0 is also a bit of a joke considering how long it’s been stalling for, a few years back I outlined a nice migration plan to go from a nasty 2.x codebase to 3.x (because they wanted to stick with osCommerce)… it was far too painful in reality.