If I had to make a wild guess, I would say PHP has more frameworks than any other language out there. It seems like a new framework pops up every day. Personally I use CodeIgniter. I feel that it is the simplest of the existing frameworks to jump right into. If I need to bring someone else in on a project, and they are unfamiliar with CodeIgniter, I can direct them to the documentation to get them up to speed.

There are a few things with CodeIgniter that bug me though. One of them is a lack of SSL functionality built in, another is not being able to use $_GET when I want to, and  a big one for me is error pages. I would like CodeIgniter to have error controller that can use views from the view folder. I modified my version of CodeIgniter to support SSL, and I just live without $_GET (I would only want to use this to be lazy anyway).

Recently, as an experiment, I decided to write a CodeIgniter-esque framework of my own. I do not plan on using it. I just felt like doing it and I learned a little in the process. It was a good experiment. The system still lacks refining and I’ve got some extra code thrown in that I was either playing with or planning to grow out (or throw out) some. The model class could use a lot of work and is pretty useless in it’s current state. I also wrote an installer for it that creates the config.php file (after I wrote the installer I thought, what sort of PHP developer would need an installer to configure a config.php file). But, it was fun. If you want to dig through the code feel free. I wouldn’t recommend  use this as a platform to develop a site on. Since a day might come when owning this code may prove useful, I’m releasing it with an MIT license. Oh by the way… Please don’t bother critiquing this as I did not spend an enormous amount of time on it, nor have I looked for bugs, security holes etc. It was just for fun. OH! the 1 benefit to this “framework”… it’s small!

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Ok, if you’re a developer like me, it’s not often you find a product that what you want how you want it. I’ve been on a quest to find a great open source shopping cart developed in PHP. I have tried the following open source carts.

OS Commerce
Zen Cart
Magento
Prestashop
Open Cart
PHPMass

Ultimately… I am completely disappointed.  I would not want to use any of the carts listed above for a client website. Either the admin side is weak and doesn’t offer much of anything (open cart), or it offers too much (Magento) and in many cases (except magenta and possible Prestashop) the interface is incredibly ugly. Is it too much to ask for a simple shopping cart that is designed well, that offers a decent selection of payment gateways, a few nice features like coupons and end it there? If anyone knows of such a cart, let me know! OS Commerce or Zen Cart is the closest thing to what I want, but I find them to have the some of the worst interfaces of the list. Prestashop was decent, but it seems to be going in a direction opposite of what I want, sort of like a Magento wannabe. The only cart that I’ve used and liked (at least somewhat) is a commercial cart called digishop. But in my opinion, one of digishop’s greatest flaws is not being open source. They have a little statement on their site that says it’s open source once you pay for it, meaning that the code is not encrypted, but that is far from what I consider to be “open source”. I think the benefit of open source technology is the community. The community that can help develop, patch, extend, answer questions for people new to the system etc. Digishop also lacks developer documentation. So anyone wanting to dive right in, needs to figure it out on their own.

I believe this has led me to a place though where I may develop my own cart. I am a big fan of the Code Igniter framework, and would love to see a simple shopping cart that has some basic functionality in it (user accounts, coupons, easily extendable, and a few decent payment gateway options) and, a decent non-ugly interface. If anyone out there knows of a project started like this already, I’d love to hear about it. All my searches for a code igniter cart have let me down.