So..... What's with the new web site?

Submitted by celeritous on Wed, 03/17/2010 - 09:58

If you are a previous or frequent visitor you may notice some major changes in the web site.

We have been using an open source shopping cart package named Zen-Cart for a number of years now. It was functional, but limiting as far as adding other content. To add forums, blogs or technical content required installing and maintaining third party packages such as PHPBB or Wordpress.

The final straw was the announcement of an "imminent" release of a major new upgrade in late 2008 scheduled for early 2009. some 14 months later there is not even a beta release of the new package and the developers have turned openly hostile towards the user community who dare to ask about the release schedule and have closed off all discussion of it on their forum. 

We began looking for a new (open source) Content Management System (CMS) in early 2009 which would support a shopping cart environment as robust and flexible as Zen-Cart as well as having tightly integrated blogging, forums and technical content. We narrowed it down to Joomla and Drupal.  

We installed both in our sandbox server and played around with them for several months. The Joomla shopping cart add-in tried was Virtuemart. It shows promise, but in our opinion was not quite ready for prime time. It seems to suffer slightly for the same syndrome of Zen-Cart in that the development schedule is somewhat erratic. 

The Drupal shopping cart add-in evaluated is Ubercart. It seems to have much more active developers and user community. Drupal/Ubercart has a significant learning curve due to its incredible flexibility. The Drupal CMS has a very well defined plug-in package and theming system  almost as easy and seamless as Wordpress.  I have yet to hack any core code, which seemed to be constantly required in Zen-Cart. 

We will be adding to the site for some time to come. We will also be working on transferring all of our current users over to the new database. If you are a current user you may have to re-register if you haven't received new login credentials.

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