PHP Ecommerce Solution #4: PrestaShop
PrestaShop is the youngest solution of the five introduced in this article, with version 1.0 having been released just under 3 years ago (at the time of this writing). Over this relatively brief period, both PrestaShop development and worldwide adoption has continued at a rapid pace, with version 1.4 adding an impressive 65 new features and more than 50,000 shops having been created since the project’s inception. The hard work was acknowledged with the project winning Packt Publishing’s coveted 2010 open source award for ecommerce.
Like Magento, PrestaShop has created an active extensions marketplace, with more than 700 free and commercial modules available at the time of this writing. Additionally you’ll find more than 700 templates useful for theming your store in accordance with every imaginable commercial sector.
PrestaShop is open source software, published under the Open Software License. You can download the latest version from the PrestaShop website. Also, be sure to check out the official demo.
PHP Ecommerce Solution #5: UberCart
All of the solutions described thus far are standalone, meaning that nothing else generally needs to be installed except for the LAMP stack. However, because so many websites run on content management systems such as Drupal, I thought it would be useful to conclude this article with at least one bit of insight into a popular CMS module named UberCart .
UberCart is one of Drupal’s most popular modules, with more than 30,000 websites using this combination to power their ecommerce operation. The advantages of doing so are many, including the notable ability to use UberCart in conjunction with the rest of the Drupal module ecosystem. Special effort has been put into product distribution capabilities, which go beyond shipping physical products, as UberCart can also sell downloadable products such as ebooks and even products comprising a virtual economy.
UberCart is an open source project released under the GPL 2.0 license. Be sure to check out the official demo to obtain a feel for UberCart’s interface.
About the Author
Jason Gilmore is founder of the publishing, training, and consulting firm WJGilmore.com. He is the author of several popular books “Easy PHP Websites with the Zend Framework”, “Easy PayPal with PHP”, and “Beginning PHP and MySQL, Fourth Edition”. Follow him on Twitter at @wjgilmore.
