Shopping Cart Focused Portal with 4 Open Source PHP Programs

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In previous blog,  Integrating Shopping cart like Magento, Zencart With A Wordpress Blog, we learnt that there are great benefits with having both shopping cart such as zen cart, magento, prestashop, oscommerce, etc.  integrated with wordpress into your Internet business, and someday shopping carts with integrated blogs will be the new community. This post takes a step further, talking about shopping cart focused portal with four open source php programs.

Nowadays, many website hosting providers offer free open source programs that will enable you to create professional-grade websites that will help you build your business. These programs are all capable of producing websites for the purposes of search engine optimization, depending on how they are designed and constructed and what plugins are used, and they vary in terms of ease-of-use (learning curve), community support, flexibility, and Web 2.0 compatibility.

 

1. Zen Cart

Zen Cart is a shopping cart content management system that will help you generate pages for thousands of products. This can be used for any product-based website, and it can accept credit cards through Paypal or any other major online payment gateway.

Adding products is as easy as writing in accurate descriptions and uploading images. Products can be arranged in categories and subcategories. This shopping cart is suitable for both physical and virtual products, but modifying it will require skills in graphic design because the standard template appears a bit outdated.

This shopping cart can act as a standalone website, or it can be installed into a sub-directory of your main site.

2. Joomla

The Joomla content management systems is capable of creating dynamic websites that can contain a wide variety of interactive and visually impressive features. Many corporate and personal websites use this CMS because it can be easily modified, and it can manage and organize thousands of pages.

There is a vast community of developers and designers that provides addons and plugins that are called "components" and "mambots". Free plugins such as discussion forums, shopping carts, media galleries, Google Adsense scripts, and blogs are available.

Web pages in Joomla are considered "content items" that are categorized hierarchally in sections and categories. Each section contains categories, and as "content items" are created, they must be assigned to categories.

In addition, there are hundreds of free Joomla templates available on the web that you can download and modify, or you can create your own template if you have some web-design skills.

Alternatively, you may use Drupal.

 

3. Wordpress

The Wordpress CMS was specifically designed for blogging, but it can do that and a whole lot more. There are thousands of free templates and themes available online at the wordpress site.

Wordpress is even easier to use than Joomla, and it enables users to share, create, and advertise their content. Wordpress plugins can be installed through any FTP program, and they can add shopping carts, analytics, and photo galleries to your site.

Webpages are created either by blog posts or making new pages under the "Manage" tab. Links on the side or top menu can be modified under the "Blogroll" tab, and much like Joomla, themes can be changed on the fly under the "Presentation" tab.

From an SEO (search engine optimization) perspective, this CMS is fairly effective in getting decent keyword ranking in Google and other search engines if you install the "All-in-one-seo-pack" plugin and build a site with solid content.

 

4. Simple Machines Forum (SMF)

Simple Machines Forum — SMF in short — is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes.

Its powerful custom made template engine puts you in full control of the lay-out of your message board and with our unique SSI - or Server Side Includes - function you can let your forum and your website interact with each other.

SMF is written in the popular language PHP and uses a MySQL database. It is designed to provide you with all the features you need from a bulletin board while having an absolute minimal impact on the resources of the server. SMF is the next generation of forum software - and best of all it is and will always remain completely free.

As well, alternatively, you may use phpBB or myBB.