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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.

Many software development companies offer open source chat software solutions. These software program enables the user to chat from anywhere at anytime.  AJAX Chat, X7 Chat, DSpace, LlamaChat are some of the well known open source software programs. These programs enable the users to send quick chat invitations to their friends, business associates and others. Easily one can chat with any number of people and set away messages. These days many open source chat software have the feature to save the history of chat for easy reference. These online chat softwares are used to create online discussion forums. They are generally written using PHP programming lanaguage and uses MySQL as the database. vBulletin is one of the online discussion forum software that can run on any platform that supports PHP. Apart from creating discussion forums these online chat software helps in creating an online community of users.

Some companies prefer to have internal chat software for better communication between the employees as they can solve their problems quickly through instant discussions. Further these chat programs can also be used for interacting with the clients. Easily they can ask questions over the Internet and set chat server software on your company server.

If you are interested in getting an open chat software program designed and developed then hire a team of professional who have the experience in designing and developing the open source chat software. Before you hire a company make sure that they provide you with following features:

* Demo

* Screenshots

* Features

* Requirements

* Documentation

* Support

* Team

* Localizations

* Credits

* License

* Download

* Source

Some companies these days offer with 100% chat customization facility as well.  Even the multiple language option can be set if you desire so. The administrator depending on your need can define the configuration parameters for the documents that can sent as an attachment.

It seems that open source software (customization) is really coming of age now. It’s making its mark in the commercial world, it’s rewriting all the rules, and it’s impossible to ignore it. When it comes to open source customization, Jooma is a great option. Through Joomla, you can build an attractive and innovative website, and Joomla’s various development solutions are bound to make you happy. So what is Joomla then? It’s a free open source CMS (Content Management System) which makes your site look much, much better. There are many Joomla developers around, with many years of experience, who will be able to give you exactly what you need. You can use Joomla, or any other Open Source CMS, for that matter, to get great features like Directory, Picture / Photo Gallery, Help Desk, Support Desk, Google Map, Real Estate Property Rental, E-commerce, Showcase / Catalogue, and Recruitment / Job Portal, besides many others. In fact, an Open Source CMS can even give you Newsflash scrolling and a Chat room!

Open source customization is always guaranteed to give you wonderful results. At the end of the day, it boils down to you choosing the right application, and getting it properly implemented with the help of suitable expertise. Open source customization can help you build a highly interactive and innovative website (a modular one that gives you options to upgrade), with a website design that is both stylish and affordable. You should go for an Open Source CMS that gives you options like Printable Versions, Page Caching, RSS Feeds, blogs, etc. If you go for Joomla in Open Source CMS, then you must consider services like Joomla Module Installation, Joomla Custom Design Templates, Joomla Design Integration, Joomla Custom Modules Development, Maintenance Work for Joomla Portals, Joomla Custom Components Development, and Joomla Custom Modification and Customization.

When it comes to you, nothing is too good for your website. That’s exactly why you should choose a good form of Open source customization, and a good Open Source CMS, to make sure that your website looks flawless, and runs flawlessly too. There are loads of companies out there who will take the responsibility of such a task for you – go for one that is effective and efficient in its administration, one that gives you high-level server security, responsive services, complete e-commerce solution (permanent and fast storefront access), etc. Open source customization can give you an E-commerce solution that not only supports multiple languages, but is also SEO-friendly. It is essential to put your company’s business online, and to do that, you need a website. That is why a great looking website is always important, and for that, you need proper Open source customization and Open Source CMS. Magento in particular is highly recommended, because it is good at customizing your content, looks, and templates, as well as functionality, of the website. With Magento, you get many customer-friendly features, and you can localize your content as well. Yes, a good website is essential, that’s where Open source customization and Open Source CMS is important.

One of the languages developed on top of the Java Virtual Machine is the Jython, and this project began in 1997. the development of the language has been passed on to several lead developers until Sun Microsystems took over and worked full time on it. Jython 2.2 which is the latest release matches up to the CPython 2.2 release but later, its developers shifted to a new direction for its implementation using ASM and ANTLR to hasten development time. With the interactive interpreter found inside the jar file, you can discover the capabilities of Jython, most specially in executing files.

When using the Open Source Software for commercial gain minus the tricks and preserving the community and openness aspects, there are two things to consider: that payment is collected proportionate to the advantage gained from the software; and that active user in the community can have the assurance that their license charges is compensated in relation to their code contributions. This means a user is allowed to have open access to the source code, allowed to redistribute it, and free rights to make changes to the code; being able to initiate some limited charges supported by certain restricted types of program execution, and agreeing to cash or in kind payments.

Open source software and open source documents are fast gaining popularity. It is firmly gaining a growing market share as well as getting the corporate and the public’s interests. It is also quickly entering mainstream, being in the technology world starting 1998. However its concept began alongside the birth of computing. Frequently Asked Questions list or FAQs were the first documents to be known as having used the open source software but beside this information little is known about this list. Open source needs good documentation to spread out to new users and three forms are currently in use: ReadMe files, Manual pages, and HowTo documents.

There are two types of software being used: the conventional closed source from software vendors; and the open source, with Linux and MySQL as examples. Both software have managed to be on the same footing and is in existence probably almost at the same time, around the start of the computing world. Recently, customers are expressing disappointment over the closed source protocol software but are not inclined to be completely dependent on the open source programs. They are looking for warranties, agreements and vendor assurance that they have qualified and committed developers. Their areas of concern with open source deal with collaborative source software and license and feedback from it.

Web Services for Remote Portal provides a pattern for the portal application to allocate portlets between portals. It is the facility to produce an interface to useful function that can be used throughout the enterprise with little or no changes to existing code. Almost all of the newest versions of commercial and open space portal products support it. The key procedure is similar to earlier web services – producer provides WSDL that directs the consumer on how to create a SOAP request. SOAP responses are obtained at the presentation level and the consumer then decides where to display them. Being simple, it provides whatever the enterprise needs to reuse portals across the enterprise.

How will you accomplish the preferred functionality and look for your website? For a layman, this will be a dilemma that appears unassailable until he/she comes across open source customization.

Open source customization involves tailoring open source content management system (CMS) or scripts like Joomla, WordPress, Oscommerce, Mambo and PHPBB to adorn the website with the choicest look and functionality. However, a layman can still not sail through open source customization until he/she has a good knowledge of PHP, CSS, and HTML. It just like payday advance for your family.

Open source Content Management Systems like WordPress and Joomla are of great use in modern techno-freak world. WordPress forms the most popular blogging platform, with many a people hosting their weblogs on this platform. With respect to the other blog platforms, it is relatively easier to publish and organize content on WordPress. Want to upload your favourite photos and videos for others to see. WordPress allows these and more. Many a users are now using this free-to-use platform to build websites. Besides WordPress blogs and websites are more user-friendly and SEO friendly, thanks to the host of in-built functionalities.

Joomla is relatively tougher, but this award winning open source software allows you to build a seamless website without even messing with HTML, CSS or PHP. Another important advantage of using Joomla is that the website developer has a greater command on the look and feel of the website. Also one can try a whole spectrum of ways to view different parts of the website. Like plug-ins in WordPress, Joomla offers a host of components that can be downloaded for free and for a small charge on the internet.

The obvious question then is what the need for customization is if these open source web based softwares are so sound and seamless. The answer is in the large number of benefits that can be had through open source customization. Want to have a contact form or an image slideshow on the website? Open source customization is the answer. Open source customization also offers browser compatibility so that the website looks consistent in whatever browser it is viewed. What’s more the website shows content uninterrupted in all screen sizes.

That essays the role of customization in open source softwares. Now the website built on Joomla or WordPress is ready to be customized.There are two important parts which need to be considered while customization-Design part and Functionality part. The former defines how your website will look to the users. A large number of CMS have different files for design and programming. It is the style sheet in the theme folder where the design changes are to be made. In Joomla, look out for the template files that feature the content in the screen with preferred font colors, heading, list style and so on.