There will be no barriers to people downloading/using/hacking Cart45 - unless you consider actually purchasing something a barrier.

In regards to supporting other databases, we may do this in the future if there is significant call for it - I suspect there will not.

From reading this blog post - I get the impression that Cart45 is only available to purchase. How can you expect to build a community around a product when it’s not free (or presumably open)?

Wordpress and friends succeed because there are no barriers to people downloading/using/hacking them.

Finally, from the above, it sounds like you didn’t build it to support alternative databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSQL or SQLite). This should be easy if you’ve used e.g. PDO, and would at least be a useful selling point.

David.

And here’s +1 for PHP5/MySQL5. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to require these days and I have seen some performance benefits (particularly as part of a larger install, mix of software).

This looks really great — something we’ve been (ahem) shopping around for. Not only could it become the WP of ecommerce, it could become the ecommerce of WP installs.

The config files are very well commented and yes, you are right that they are not overly friendly to a non-programmer but, I don’t believe they are completely baffling. I think we have to expect there to be a small learning curve with using any price of software.

A user may accidentally delete a semi-colon from a switch statement but another user may misspell their domain when entering details into a config-file-creation-wizard and end up with the same problem.

Just one pretty big security risk that I noticed - in the installation screencast the .htaccess file is CHMOD to 777.

This makes your website and server extremely vulnerable to attack and I would strongly advise against installing the script as a result. Especially for site owners that use shared servers or have little understanding of server security.

I would instead use CHMOD 755 - but if you must use 777, then you should CHMOD it back to 644. Wordpress requires you to CHMOD .htaccess too and has the same issues because some people just use 777.

I also noticed that your config file wasn’t very non-programmer friendly - i.e. you have to modify a switch statement to declare LIVE and TEST variables of the site. There is nothing wrong with doing that if it works, but in my experience, it’s better to make config files very easy to understand and therefore hard to break - or even better, CHMOD the config file and make it part of the installation process.

If a novice edits the file and misses out a closing brace, semi-colon or something like that, it will cause the entire app to error. You will find that most people that buy your product are novices that can’t code their own systems and have little if any PHP experience.

These are just two things I spotted watching the installation screencast - there could be many more (as there always is in web-software of this scale) - so if you would like me to perform a full diagnosis on the code, get in touch!

Hope this advice helps

Cheers

James

@Andy Sounds wonderful! I love that Cart45 will support “bolt-on” services/modules. This sounds like a really promising shopping cart and I’ll definitely be keeping a close eye on it.

I don’t have enough experience with the various merchant account providers and payment gateways to create a module, but I hope as Cart45 matures that other developers with the necessary experience will develop these types of modules.

It sounds like you guys have done a great job!

So if you wanted to develop a PayPal module for Cart45, you could do that and we would sell it as a “bolt-on” service/module on your behalf. You will obviously get to keep the lionshare of the profits from every customer who purchases your module as long as you choose to keep it available for sale.

It’s not only merchant provider bolt-ons that can be developed by the way, shipping modules, themes, custom cart options, packs for different industries and whatever else you can think of are all open for development.

There are many great benefits to this approach. First and foremost it prevents the system from becoming bloated like many other cart systems are. Customers can simply purchase the base system for a low price, then add only the extras they want, at the time they want them. The other big benefit is that developers can create themselves another revenue stream by becoming official module developers and selling their “apps” onto other developers and shop owners.

If you are interested - actually if anyone is interested - in developing modules for Cart45, send an email to hello@soapyco.com and we’ll give you a sneak preview of what we have in mind for this module store.