As Timur mentioned yesterday (already?):
I am beginning to think that Wordpress is one of the most stable web applications I have seen.
Due to some plans, I’ve made a small research on the point of using a e-commerce CMS to perform basic shopping transactions. After few minutes of googling, I came out with Zen Cart, osCommerce, NucleusCMS and Wordpress as open-source solutions for installing your personal e-commerce shop.
It looks that I’ll stick to WP platform due to small facts that can be taken as an advantage of WP:
- Great Supporting/Development community
- Very neat and flexible Template design (no headaches with changing index.php, single.php, etc)
- Good CMS architecture (even me, as the second laziest person in Cyprus (After Leonid :D) can work with this platform)
- Big plug-in database (and the plug-ins are normally working, without redoing them)
These are the main advantages, you can notice from the first sight, after using Wordpress for a while. But I’ve never thought that things can be worse then this. They can. Zen-Cart Templates database almost made me cry.A main advantage of this CMS is XHTML template architecture, therefore, it’s very easy to accommodate for user needs. osCommerce amazed me with .pdf files in template archives, instead of ready-made solutions: you expect of getting a nice, handsome template, but as the result you get an Acrobat manual “How to customize your website”.Thanks! Therefore, this platform give a really good payment support for the products: Paypal, Google Checkout, Credit cards and so on.
NucleusCMS showed itself as a great CMS, which bunch of plug-ins, facilities you can install on your on-line shop, but after Wordpress admin panel, it’s really inconvenient to switch for Nucleus after Wordpress.
Although, Wordpress got few minor disadvantages for being used as on-line shop:
- Only two e-commerce plug-ins are in stock right now.
- e-Commerce plug-ins are an add-on type for the blogging platform, they don’t replace the major usage of WP
- Search problem issue. Built-in search of Wordpress do not index product pages from e-Commerce wp plug-in (so you need yet another plug-in, but not “search for everything”, because it won’t do)
- Main payment capacity is processed via Paypal, there is no Google Checkout plug-in, yet, therefore, GCheckout already earned 8% of the market as payment system, and it’s most probably the main competitor of Paypal in a close future
4 versus 4. A tie, but these disadvantages seem to be minor for Wordpress in comparison with support & development features of mentioned CMS. Maybe I’ve overstated negative features of those CMS’es, or I wasn’t searching an appropriate solution in a right way.
What over CMS can you suggest and describe their main features which you like?
February 23rd, 2007 at 10:11 am
Regarding the disadvantages:
Many e-commerce service providers give you a piece of HTML code to stick into your web site’s template to have a cart or credit card processing. That’s pretty easy to do with WordPress, even if no official plugin exists to do it for you.
Online shops are usually combined of a few modules - news section and shop being two of them. If you use WP, you have news section and you need to integrate the shop part. If you use something else, chances are, that you’ll have it the opposite way. Which one is better for you - you choose.
Search functinality is easy. You can adopt your shop to use WordPress posts for products (with custom fields and categories). You’ll have your search working. Or you can use one of Google’s ways - “search term site:yoursite” or a Custom Search Engine (CSE/Co-op).
If there is no plugin for Google Checkout, it doesn’t mean that you can’t add it. Again, Google, like PayPal, gives you a piece of code to integrate with your theme. That’s trivial to do in WordPress.
February 25th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Thanks, Leo, for some enlightenments, because I haven’t worked with payment systems except the ones used in Russia.