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Get your business up and running online using a free open source shopping cart.

Open source software provides a low cost alternative to traditional proprietary software.   Merchants have the ability to customize open source products to meet their specific business requirement.  When trying to select a shopping cart system, to run your online store, business owners must evaluate and assign value to the technical and operational specifications before deploying to production.  Since one size does not fit all; merchants must choose the best product based on their unique requirements.

So how do you choose the best open source shopping cart software?  First we’ll start by listing the major players in the small business market.  In order to make my list the open source shopping cart must meet the 10 minimum requirements listed below.

Required Features:

Centrally controlled source code An active developer community Mature third party extensions (including PCI Compliant payment gateway extensions) Support Linux and Microsoft Windows hosting environments Software download must include all features listed on website (e.g. not crippleware or demoware) Documentation may be available as a PDF document or as an HTML file. Installs on a standard SSL certificate Provides a custom notification email to the merchant and customer Provides timely bug fixes and safe upgrade path Installs in a dedicated and shared hosting environment

In my opinion, the top open source shopping carts for the small business market are:

Magento Commerce VirtueMart osCommerce ZenCart CubeCart UberCart AbleCommerce

Each of the open source shopping carts listed above can be downloaded, installed and configured at no cost to the merchant.   However, since most open source product installations come with a standard (non commercial quality) user interface most merchants will want to upgrade the GUI (graphical user interface).  In order to upgrade the GUI and improve the end user experience merchants can choose to hire a web developer or simply purchase a custom template from sites like templatemonster.com.  Template Monster (and others) provides thousands of affordable custom templates so merchants can easily deploy great looking online stores.



In order to ensure you’re selecting the best open source shopping cart for your business merchants should consider the following:

Capacity – The merchant must know and understand the product capacity limitation.  For example, if you have a product catalog of 1000 products but the shopping cart has a 900 product limitation then that solution is not for you.  Note: All of the open source products listed above have an unlimited product catalog.

Performance – If your ecommerce web store is slow customers will simply shop someplace else.  Therefore, you must check performance with high user loads and with increased data loads.  Both scenarios can bring a web store to its knees.

Community Support – Verify a strong development community exist.  Review the online forums to see if the product has an active community of developers.  Look for online questions then see how long it took for the user to get a response.

Technical Support – Ensure technical support is available via an active developer community or as a fee paid contract.  There is nothing worse than having a production issue and waiting 5 days or more to get an answer.

Payment Gateway Support – In order to accept and process credit card payments the open source shopping cart must provide third party payment gateway extensions.  Free Payment Modules from Planetauthorize.Net Payment Gateway (and others) are available for the leading open source shopping carts.

Search Engine Friendly URL – Once you deploy your ecommerce web store you must submit your web store to the top search engines.  In order to be indexed by the search engines your online store must have search engine friendly URLs.

For more information visit us online at planetauthorize.com.

Free? Can’t be any good then! Not so!

The quality, availability and range of free open source software for windows is superb and rivals, if not betters some mainstream software.

So what kind of applications are available?

Just about anything you can think of. I don’t intend to list all that’s available because it would take pages and you can easily do a Google search in your browser but be prepared for long list to go through.

A good place to start for Windows is www.opensourcewindows.org. This site doesn’t list everything rather it lists the most popular.

So let’s have a look at some of those.

One of the most popular is Open Office. Which is a large, full featured suite of tools for word processing and spreadsheets. compatible with and a free replacement for Microsoft Word documents. It also supports the OpenDocument Format and has something that other office suites don’t have, the ability to turn your documents into PDF format.

Best of all, OpenOffice can be downloaded and used entirely free of any licence fees. OpenOffice is released under the LGPL licence. This means you may use it for any purpose – private, commercial, educational, public administration. You may install it on as many PC’s as you like. You may make copies and give them away to family, friends, students, employees – anyone you like.

OK, we’ve saved $500 approximately.

Let’s see what else is on offer.There are browsers, email clients, FTP clients, media players, personal finance and so on and on and on.

One of my favourites and one that I use a lot is Gimp. Full name, GNU Image Manipulation Program. It’s a lot more than a mere manipulation program however. Gimp, in fact is a rival to Photoshop and it’s uses extend to graphics creation, photo enhancement, special effects, drawing, the list goes on covering just about any graphics operation you can think of.

One big plus with Gimp is the ability to open Photoshop PSD files along with the layer information enabling you to edit the PSD’s quite freely

I first came across Gimp on the rare occasions that I happened on a Linux system and assumed it was just the Linux version of Windows Paint accessory. Boy, was I wrong!

Whilst it will be fairly easy to begin using the Open Office suite Gimp is a whole new learning curve. It is, after all a fairly specialist program. Fortunately the internet is full of tutorials of varying degrees and quality covering the different aspects of working with Gimp.

Unfortunately because there are so many it can take hours if not days sorting out the wheat from the chaff and really getting what you want to know to get going. A lot of them are text and screenshots only which aren’t always as easy to follow as video where you can actually see what’s happening.

Being a frequent user of Gimp I have put together a series of 12 video tutorials on getting going with Gimp.Whilst some of these are aimed at creating a salespage the majority cover the essentials of working with Gimp to get you off to a flying start. As well as basic techniques there are advanced techniques covered, such as creating reflections and shadows.

We’ve now just saved ourselves a minimum $700.

Whilst there are many more open source free applications out there to be reviewed I will have to finish here and cover more of them in other articles, so keep an eye out for those.

It really is worth reviewing the open source software available. Apart from really specialised software you can almost certainly find all the programs you will ever need for free.

God bless those programmers who give of their time and talent to create these superb free applications.

Among computer programming languages, there is no single application that does all the different things, in all the different ways, that programmers need. Because of the great number and diversity of programming tasks, choosing a web application programming language has become a critically important step.

Fortunately, there is continuing development in the field, and today the number of capable applications is expanding. Database-driven websites can now be built with such varied scripting languages as PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, Perl and Cold Fusion, which fall into two main groups – proprietary and open-source. In the foregoing examples, all are open-source except the proprietary Cold Fusion and ASP.NET.

PHP pros and cons

As an open-source application, PHP was developed (and continues to be developed) by an active, engaged, international community of users. This is a great example of strength in numbers. Another strength of PHP, of course, is cost. It’s free.

Because it is free, open-source software, PHP can be compiled and “tweaked” for most any operating system. In fact, there are even pre-compiled versions available for the majority of operating systems, both commercial and freeware.

You can also relax a bit more with PHP, as you can count on its being updated and improved more often than other languages. In an open, collaborative and non-hierarchical environment, suggested improvements can be adopted quickly. Again, this is a strength that is derived from its open-source status.

PHP is a mature application, though younger than Perl, for instance. However, it does have a few weaknesses that may be minor annoyances to some, but deal-killers for other programmers. Its lack of event-based error handling means that your workflow may be interrupted by a sudden jump to a special error-handling section. Finally, its lack of case sensitivity for its function names will run afoul of many professionals’ long-established work habits.

ASP.NET = flexibility

ASP.NET is arguably the most flexible of the programming tools, and “plays nice” with both scripted languages (VBScript, Jscript, Perlscript, Python) and compiled ones (VB, C, Cobol, Smalltalk, Lisp). This flexibility is also apparent in the application’s compatibility with such development environments as WebMatrix, VisualStudio.NET and Borland’s Delphi and C++ Builder.

On the downside, ASP.NET is a memory hog and somewhat slower to execute than its competitors. For this kind of application, that can be a serious weakness – on the Internet, it may be called upon to scale to thousands of users per second. Its memory usage can easily become problematic on your server.

JSP (Java Server Pages)

JSP is an open-source scripting language supported by Oracle, so developers can use Oracle JDeveloper to create JSP pages. This can be accomplished without having to learn the Java language first, relieving you of the task of writing Java scriptlets. It is also extensible, allowing Java tag library developers to outfit it with simple tag handlers that use a new, simpler, cleaner tag extension Application Programming Interface (API).

JSP has integrated the JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) expression language, and it now supports functions. This greatly eases the creation and maintenance of JSP pages.

The most significant disadvantage of JSP is that there is no XML-compliant version of JSP comments, forcing developers to use client-side, HTML/XML-style comments (or embed Java comments). Depending, once again, on your particular needs, this may or may not be sufficient reason to eschew the use of JSP.

A shiny Perl

An open-source language that is both mature and powerful, Perl offers web developers about every tool they need to create dynamic web pages. Like other open-source languages, it benefits tremendously from ongoing development, and the support offered by its international community of users is second to none.

Perl is particularly good for creating single websites quickly, cleanly and elegantly. If it has a major identifiable weakness, it is that it may be unnecessarily complicated. If you are not comfortable switching gears among a variety of syntaxes, it may not be the best tool for you.

The real ColdFusion

Originally built by Allaire and then purchased by Macromedia, ColdFusion is now owned by Adobe. It is very easy to get started building websites with it, and you can deploy powerful web applications and services with less training – and in less time, using fewer lines of code – than with PHP and JSP.

ColdFusion is now at version 8, although many programmers are still using the various iterations of ColdFusion MX, variously known as ColdFusion MX 6, ColdFusion MX 6.1, ColdFusion MX 7, ColdFusion MX 7.0.1, ColdFusion MX 7.0.2, ColdFusion 7, ColdFusion 7.0.1 and ColdFusion 7.0.2. However, ColdFusion MX to ColdFusion 8 is a valid upgrade path. In fact, upgrading to ColdFusion 8 is supported for the two most recent previous major releases of the program.

ColdFusion supports most major databases, from Oracle and Sybase to Microsoft SQL Server and Access. With its own markup language (CFML) and tags to connect to the database, it is relatively easy to create forms and dynamic pages. It also has all the benefits of CGI for today’s broadbased developers. Its weaknesses are few, but expert users will caution that it is probably the most difficult to maintain.

Bottom line

Secure and scalable web applications are important to every business with an Internet presence (which is every business today, isn’t it?) and can directly affect productivity, sales, reputation and profits. If you want to develop a web application and do not have the expertise in-house, any number of reputable web development firms can help you determine the right tools for your task.

Whether your application development happens in-house or with outside assistance, it is important that management understands the basics. You don’t have to become a programmer, of course, but to make good business decisions you do need to know what these powerful tools are all about. As long as you learn enough to help make the appropriate decision, you can leave the actual coding and compiling to the experts.

PHP supported website is always a good option.

Why?

PHP is a powerful server-side scripting language for creating dynamic and interactive websites.

Today PHP is the most widely used programming language on the web, with over 40% of all web applications are written in PHP and is installed on over 22 million domain servers.

PHP is a free open source language that saves thousands of dollars in licensing fee and that makes it more cost-effective than its competitors like ASP.NET, Visual Basic.net and Java.

PHP is very easy to install and PHP websites are fast, secure and stable. It provides web developers much more liberty in creating website with some of the excellent features and they can use common elements repeatedly.

A PHP supported website can retrieve information from database and for that you need a relational database management system like MSQL. Databases can be used in new ways and users have access to this centralized data. Small websites can utilize PHP to obtain feed back from users on their products and services.

It is a well known fact that most of the popular websites are dynamic in nature as compared to the websites that are having plain pages. User friendly websites attract more visitors and loyal customers that ultimately results in the rise in your online business. So, if you are planning to create dynamic web pages, you must consider PHP websites.

If you want to develop a website, you should make sure that you have designed and developed efficient website; else you will have to start from the beginning again. At http://www.xceedagents.com/php/php.php, you can have a look at some of the examples of PHP supported websites. Developers at XceedAgents have expertise in developing high-end PHP supported websites to its clients world-wide.