In the world of commercial shopping cart systems, there are a select few open source candidates that have remained competitive. One of these is Zen Cart. This software, written in PHP/MySQL has been around since 2003 and like many of us, it just keeps getting better with age. It has helped thousands and thousands of small and large internet retailers realize their goals of opening an online store. Full-featured and highly flexible, Zen Cart does just about anything you want it to, right out of the box.
Zen Cart was developed and is maintained by a core group of 4 developers. I had the pleasure of speaking with Kim Elliott, one of the core team members.
The project started as a fork of osCommerce, so much of the early codebase resembled that of osC. As long time contributors and active community members of the osC community, when there were some differences in opinion, the group decided to fork the project and morph it into something new.
“The main goals of the project,” Kim told me, “are two-fold: first, we want to have a helpful community, which includes involvement by the developers actively working on the core. Second, we want the majority of our users to be able to download and install and be able to use right out of the box.” Having a lot of built-in functionality in the standard install is clearly important to the team, as they are continually adding commonly requested features to each new release.
One of the secrets of the long standing success of the project has been the ability for the team to work closely with each other. In Kim’s words, they are like “four parts of the same brain, each of us complementing the others’ weaknesses and playing on their strengths.” Their relationships is built on honesty and trust, and they leave their egos at home. Although they are spread across the globe, over the past few years, the team has scheduled in-person hack-a-thons, where they meet together for a few days and hack on the core, cranking out as much code as they can. Otherwise, they stay in constant contact through collaborative tools like IM and IRC.
When I asked Kim if she had any advice for those open source projects who are just starting out, or struggling, she said, “The hardest thing is to not get distracted by one-off problems. If you have thousands of users, everybody will have their own little tweaks. Focus on what’s applicable to the majority, decide what’s truly needed in the core, and stick with it. It’s easy to get off-track.”
There are exciting things in the works for the Zen Cart team; as the 2.0 release will be a major rewrite and one that has been a long time coming. They will be refactoring to include more OOP, redoing the templating system, including jQuery support, and reworking the checkout flow. If you are an e-commerce merchant, this is one shopping cart system you want to keep your eyes on.
For more information or to download the Zen Cart package: http://www.zen-cart.com
Donations to the team: http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=infopages&pages_id=14