8 Best Open Source Shopping Carts

Hey Everyone, On Sunday I was contacted by a client and they said the needed a shopping cart up by Monday. Since they needed this cart up so fast I went to the easiest solution I knew, Open Source Shopping Carts. I browsed through tons of shopping carts and put together a list of only the best carts. The list is below.
Presta Shop: Presta Shop is robust, professional grade e-Commerce shopping cart that you can download, install, and use for free. In the back end, you will use a full featured back end to manage your inventory, orders, shipping, and customers in real time. Your customer’s payments are sent directly to your commercial bank account using the latest security technology. You can even add your own modules to the shopping cart.

Opencart: Opencart is an open source PHP based online shopping cart system. OpenCart is easy to use and is SEO optimized with a very nice interface. A great feature of OpenCart is that customers can write their own reviews of the products.

Magento: Magento is a professional open-source e-Commerce solution offering unprecedented flexibility and control. Magento is awesome, I would never believe it is an open-source project. It features clean urls and SEO from the start. Everything is designed in a clean and simple way. Magento also features: Unlimited flexibility, Completely Scalable Architecture, Professional and Community Support, and Smooth Integration with 3rd party apps.

Cubecart: Cubecart is very popular shopping cart. CubeCart V3 is free, with the exception that you leave their copyright notice in your footer. CubeCart has a large amount of payment gateways and shipping gateways. Their support forums are lively and many people contribute plugins to the cart. To use CubeCart V4 you must pay but it has many features that V3 doesn’t have.


Agora Cart: Agora Cart is another very popular online shopping cart, written in Perl/MySQL. It features a css manager so you can edit the look of your cart online. AgoraCart also features unlimited product options, up to 4 different tax zones at the same time, tons of shipping and payment gateways/options. The setup options range from a simple template based store to the integration of a complex visual design and support for program modification.

Zen Cart: Zen Cart is a free, user friendly, open source shopping cart. Zen Cart focuses on the merchants and shoppers instead of the developers. Zen Cart also supports multiple payment and shipping options, quantity discounts and coupons. Also Zen Cart is very easy to install.


Os Commerce: Os Commerce is an online shopping cart that offers a wide range of features that allows online stores to be setup fairly quickly. osCommerce is backed by a great and active community. It also supports multiple currencies, allows customers to print invoices from the order screen, and has an easy database backup system.

Store sprite: Store sprite is a powerful, free PHP/MySQL shopping cart system that is easy to install and customize. The Cart is free but it does have copyright notices that you can pay to get rid of. StoreSprite has many features including automatic tax calculation, automatic delivery cost calculations, customer ratings and reviews and featured products.

activeCollab Licenses Giveaway - Winners

Last week, a post announced 3 activeCollab Project Management Corporate licenses giveaway.

activeCollab is a feature-rich project management & collaboration application which you can install it on your servers & customize it if you want.

It organizes the project flow both for you & your customers flawlessly with powerful features like document versioning, reminders, discussions & many more.

And, here are the winners:

• Vince Verberckt (comment: 10532)
• Rami Minar (comment: 10694)
• Steve (comment: 10482)

Thanks to all WebResourcesDepot readers who joined the giveaway & congratulations to all the winners.

Website: http://www.activecollab.com

Open Source PHP Surveys

LimeSurvey is an open source PHP survey application which has almost every feature you may need.

It enables you to create conditional (questions change depending on the previous answers), open/close group surveys with e-mail invitations, reminders & more.

This PHP survey application is completely multilingual and currently supports 46 languages. Any survey can be created to support more than 1 language.

Templates can be created and any survey can be choosen to work with that template to match the design of the websites.

Some features of LimeSurvey:

• Unlimited number of surveys at the same time
• Unlimited number of questions in a survey
• Unlimited number of participants to a survey
• Multi-Lingual Surveys
• User-Management
• 20 different question types with more to come
• WYSIWYG HTML Editor
• Quotas Management
• Integration of pictures and movies into a survey
• Creation of a printable survey version
• Option for participants to buffer answers to continue survey at a later time
• Survey expiry dates for automation
• Enhanced import and export functions to text, CSV, PDF, SPSS, queXML and MS Excel format
• Basic statistical and graphical analysis with export facility
• Screen Reader Accessiblity
• W3C compliance

Requirements: PHP 5+, MySQL
Website: http://www.limesurvey.org
Demo: http://www.limesurvey.org/content/view/15/81/lang,en/
Download: http://www.limesurvey.org/content/view/22/82/lang,en/

Visual Database Design Tool

MySQL Workbench: Visual Database Design Tool

MySQL Workbench is a cross-platform, visual database design tool developed by MySQL. It is the highly anticipated successor application of the DBDesigner4 project.

This tool helps you to see the relations, indexes, tables of your MySQL database as a clear snapshot. With its simple yet effective interface, you can easily get used to MySQL Workbench.

For any developer who uses MySQL, this tool saves so much time for concentrating on other tasks rather than data modeling. You can also print the diagrams and use that sheet for faster coding (that’s what I do).

It is definitely a must use.

Powerful PHP - MySQL CMS

ImpressCMS is a powerful & free PHP - MySQL content management system which is, currently, based on famous XOOPS but developed in another direction.

It is a community developed application and has already 150+ addons including e-commerce, forum support & more.

Some features:

• Fully modularized
• User registration & personalization
• User permissions management
• Multilanguage
• Theme-based skinnable interface
• & more..
  

Requirements: PHP,MySQL
Website: http://www.impresscms.org
Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?&group_...

Manage Your Mailing Lists With poMMo

poMMo is an open source maillist manager application for adding a mailing list to your website or to organize stand alone mailings.

poMMo requires PHP & MySQL, offers a very simple web-based setup and it can be ready to use within minutes.

With an Ajaxed interface, you can create custom subscription forms & subscriber groups. After that, it provides you the necessary embed code (or HTML output) for inserting the form.

poMMo is also a smart application as it gets the list of sent-unsent-failed e-mails during the delivery and has an automated "list cleaning" feature by checking the bounced e-mails.

Other nice features of this maillist manager:

• Easy creation of subscriber groups
• Quickly import and export your subscriber base
• WYSIWYG HTML mailing creation
• Flexible collection of subscriber data through user defined "fields"
• Drag and drop field ordering
• Themeable, brandable, multilanguage
• Limit the sending of mails - throttle by hour, bytes, and domain limits
• Revolutionary AJAX based subscriber Management
• Personalize Mailings — e.g. Say "Dear Susan" vs. "Dear Subscriber"
• View and Reload sent mailings from the Mailing History page
• Mailings can be paused, resumed, and canceled "live"
• Mailings take place in the background — you can turn your computer OFF during a sending
• Subscribers can unsubscribe themselves or update their own information (including email address)

This mailing list manager application uses very low disk I/O and can be used for big mailing list groups.

P.S. Admin interface has a small compatibility problem in Firefox.

Requirements: PHP, MySQL
Website: http://www.pommo.org
Demo: http://www.pommo.org/Demo

Free Survey Application: AskPeople

AskPeople is a free PHP survey application that is simple but functional.

It supports most of the entry options with checkboxes, radio buttons, textboxes, textareas & dropdowns. Using AskPeople, a complicated survey can be created in minutes.

AskPeople has a template system where a new design can be implemented for the surveys to match the look of your website.

Some features of this free PHP survey application:

• Secure, multi-user admin interface.
• Unlimited, completely flexible templates.
• Built in file manager.
• Multipage surveys using pagebreaks between groups of questions.
• Make any question ‘required’ to ensure respondents complete it.
• Optional cookie-based protection against repeated submission of forms.
• Plain-text questionnaire export.
• Raw data editor.
• One-click project backup.

This is a handy application for creating & managing a job application form or making a market research & more.

Requirements: PHP 4+
Website: http://www.askpeople.co.uk/
Demo: http://www.askpeople.co.uk/demo
Download: http://www.askpeople.co.uk/download/index.php

PHP - Ajax Chat Application: Mia Chat

Mia Chat is an Ajaxed PHP chat application which is very simple to use & install.

It functions similar to the messenger applications, you can add buddies, chat with several users at the same time, change your online status & more.

This PHP chat supports many databases for storing data like MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle 8+, MS SQL Server 2000+, SQLite 2+ and PostgreSQL 7+.

Requirements: PHP 5.0.5+, Apache Server 1.3+
Compatibility: All Major Browsers & Databases
Website: http://wiki.brilaps.com/wikka.php?wakka=MiaChat
Demo: http://mia.brilaps.com/

WooThemes Launches With New Themes

WooThemes, which is the new face of "Premium News Themes" (premiumnewstheme.com), launched recently with some nice features.
They are a team of 4 well-known Wordpress theme designers; Adii, Magnus Jepson, Mark Forrester and Elliot Jay Stocks who are about to rise the bar in premium themes market.

Rather than the famous news theme "Premium News Theme" was offering, WooThemes currently offers 10 themes and officially promises to release at least 1 new theme every month.
A new feature; "WooThemes Club" can be a good address for users who like changing themes frequently as members of the club can download every theme (and the new themes released).
In my opinion, ProudFolio, a new Wordpress theme created by Elliot Jay Stocks is very unique as it is totally targeted to designers & other creative people who wants to present their portfolio and have a blog at the same time.
And Vibrant CMS is again a new theme which is business-targeted & very elegant (this is also the base theme of WooThemes).
If you’re looking for quality Wordpress themes with support, WooThemes is a powerful option for that.
P.S. This post is a review.
Website: http://www.woothemes.com

Cool And Free Launch Page With Ajax Newsletter

Almost every web project needs a "launch page (under construction page)" or a page to show when the website is under maintenance.

Rather than creating a new one from scratch for every project, here is a free launch page with an Ajax newsletter.

Before reading further, here is the demo for it.

Don’t forget to bookmark this resource at del.icio.us.

E-mails are saved in a .txt file with ";" delimiters. So they can be used anytime with a simple copy-paste.

Important: Before using this free launch page, change the name of the text file to anything hard to guess and also update the name of this text file in newsletter.php file’s 1st line.

You can use this template as is or update it easily to fit your needs.

Features of this free launch page:

• Ajaxed interface
• Server-side e-mail validation (secure)
• E-mails are saved in a text file with ";" delimiter. So, when your website is launched, you can simply copy and paste them to your favorite e-mail application and announce the launch.
• Configurable error & success messages
• Cross-browser (tested in all major browsers)

Requirements:

• Uses jQuery and jQuery PNGFix plugin (both included with the download).
• PHP support.

PSD files of bubbles are included in the download package.

This launch page is free to use (no links required) but can not be distributed from any other website or sold.

If you share it as a resource in your website, please link to this post. Thanks.

Ajax - PHP File Manager: eXtplorer

eXtplorer is a free Ajax - PHP file manager built with Ext JS library.

It can function both as a file manager for local files and a web-based ftp application.

Editing files with syntax highlighting, extracting archives & user management with permission levels are great features of this application.

Some features of this Ajax file manager are:

• Copy & move files and directories by drag&drop
• Dynamic directory tree with on-demand loading of subdirectories
• Rename, delete or create new files and directories
• Upload or download files just as you like

eXplorer is also available as a component for Joomla! and Mambo.

Requirements: PHP 4.3+
Compatibility: Local files & remote files as FTP
Website: http://extplorer.sourceforge.net/

Flash Captcha Generator For ASP And PHP

Internet Captcha is a Flash-based captcha script which can be generated online with a configuration interface.

It lets you define all the variables of the captcha including the distortion level, color, Flash effect & more.

The configuration wizard created the necessary JavaScript and ASP / PHP files and shows how to install this captcha script step by step.

One nice feature of Internet Captcha is, it shows you the security level of the captcha you designed.

Requirements: No Requirements
Website: http://www.icaptcha.com

Free Ajax Guestbook Application: JibberBook

JibberBook is an open source Ajaxed guestbook application built with PHP5.

It stores the data in a XML file (optional MySQL support) and provides an easy to use interface.

For security, JibberBook uses:

• HTML Purifier (see WRD post) for filtering inputs against XSS attacks.
• Akismet for spam protection so users won’t need to enter captcha information.

This PHP guestbook application uses Mootools and it is unobtrusive (it will work even if the JavaScript is disabled).

Requirements: PHP5 Support
Compatibility: All Major Browsers
Website: http://jibberbook.com/
Demo: http://jibberbook.com/#tab_demo