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Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Customization comparison: osCommerce vs. zencart vs. magento vs. opencart vs. prestashop

 


Customizing the open source ecommerce shopping carts for a unique online experience for visitors is vitally important for shopping cart owners. Below offers the evaluation of each open source shopping cart application's customization capabilities.

osCommerce    
Layout of the osCommerce pages is table based. There is very little customization that can be done from the admin panel.

Zen Cart    
Based on osCommerce, Zen Cart's layout is DIV based and relies more on CSS than its predecessor. ZC also offers more configuration options from the admin panel, such as configuring the columns and side boxes to include and offering an admin based editor for changing information included on several standard pages including the main page.

Magento    
Magento has implemented their own version of "Themes" in the design of the Magento pages. Their themes are implemented on a modular basis and provides an unprecedented flexibility in design choices, including the ability to have different designs on a per page basis. This flexibility comes at the cost of complexity, including a complex software architecture.

OpenCart    
OpenCart has a relatively simple architecture for controlling the look and layout of pages. Even without formal documentation, It is not very hard to figure out how it works and how to make changes. The architecture makes it possible to create multiple template sets that can be applied from the admin panel.           

PrestaShop    
PrestaShop allows for the turning off and on different page elements from the admin panel as well as the ability to edit the home page title and description. This includes the ability to change the position of the various elements. Beyond that, they use a theme architecture similar to OpenCart's. There are CSS files and template files that can also be edited.

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