I’m looking for some advice from the community about constructing an online store based on the following information:
About the Store:
- Online store that sells physical products
- product page will include elements such as customer reviews, product zoom, “you may like” etc.
- uses open ID
- needs a full backend to support credit card payments, order tracking, shipping, refunds, adding new products to the catalogue, etc
- needs to support 3 languages (this is a business requirement)
About my skills:
- I’ve built a similar e-commerce site in raw PHP before with many of the features I want for the new store, however that was my first big PHP project and I know it’s coded terribly
- My PHP/coding skills are novice and self taught and I have no experience with a framework but I’m keen on learning about one to improve my skills and to make the site more manageable for any coders who inherit the project after me.
My questions:
- Do you recommend I build the new store using a MVC framework? If so, which one for this type of project? I have never used one before. I have read that CodeIgniter is good for first timers but I’ve also read Kohana is great so I’m torn between the two and would prefer something that won’t have too steep a learning curve.
- Do you recommend purchasing an existing shopping cart/web store system and then modifying it? Or just building the whole thing myself. I have a 3.5 months until launch. Personally I prefer building it from the ground up because I will know all the ins and outs of the site and I really dislike getting stuck not understanding someone else’s code and how to control it. However, maybe this is ignorant of me and I should force myself to use something already existing because it’s probably coded better. Thoughts?
I have done a lot of reading and research and I felt it only made sense to ask the vastly more experienced community on Stackoverflow instead of just trying to make the decision myself.
I would recommend you to go for CakePHP framework. I did my first e-commerce project with the same and it was pretty easy to learn and gave me a fully customized site as per my needs. It has built in localization, user authentication and also an openID component readily available for it.
In my opinion if you use ecommerce solutions like OSCommerce or Magento, it gives you a lot of unnecessary features and less of required customized options.