Eli Hodapp’s large collection of words.

I’m about 95% completed with my newest online project: Old Man Hodapp’s Worldly Treasures.

 http://oldmanhodapp.com/

 I’ve toyed around with the idea of setting up an online store to sell all the things my family and I sell at various festivals, flea markets, pow wows, shin digs, swap meets, and box socials across the United States. Traditionally we’ve catered to the new age and Native American enthusiasts, but I think I can attract a much larger customer base online by creating what amounts to a J. Peterman catalog.

Dealing with the different e-commerce “solutions” (if you could even call them that) has been interesting- to say the least.  There are quite a few e-commerce hosting providers from Yahoo to Shopify, all of which charge a silly monthly fee, offer almost no storage, and a cut of your overall sales. I wasn’t happy with giving someone money for doing something that I can do myself, being a big-wig on the Internet and all.

So with that, without even testing the water with my toe, I jumped in head first in to the world of terrible open source and commercial PHP applications.

 ZenCart was the first one I tried, as it has been around the longest and seems to have a huge community behind it. It was terrible, the administration console was like something I’d expect out of something from a first generation web app perl script coded in 1996. Adding items, configuring your site, and even more basic functions were all needlessly complicated. Settings that would literally take seconds to edit in vim if they were stored in logical config files involved dozens of clicks.

The natural progression from ZenCart is osCommerce, a semi-recent fork of ZenCart’s codebase which seemingly had a thriving community actively programming add-ons and tweaks for it… which normally would be great. BUT. But, there’s always a but. The “too many chiefs not enough indians” problem which plagues most open source projects in one way or another was absolutely overwhelming in the osCommerce community. Instead of building a viable web application that people would actually want to use, they took a ZenCart install, added about six million proprietary hacks and add-ons  which served absolutely no purpose for anyone outside of the dude who developed them. The worst part about projects like this is that every additional code modification you make to the original source potentially creates gaping security holes for SQL injects and other fun stuff.

Not only that, but when a new version is released which no doubt patches some insanely severe security issue you have to literally go through each file finding snippets of code and replacing them with the updated versions. I did this once before on an iKonboard install for my LAN party years ago. NEVER AGAIN.

What was better, is that some of the most important add-ons were the cause of so much drama that often the authors were banned. For example, the guy who wrote the search engine optimization and url rewrite code (Which in my opinion is one of the most important features of any web application these days.) was banned by the community. Yeah. That makes sense. Let’s get rid of the guy who is wrote and maintains the most vital add-on. The current state of the SEO add-on seems laughable, the entire changelog is filled with idiots who are fixing one bug and creating five more.

It didn’t take long for me to give up on osCommerce.

Next up was Magento. Magento seemed pretty promising. I don’t really understand their business model though. Magento seems to be developed by a company who… gives away all their products for free? I thought we learned back in 1999 that this wasn’t the best way to run an internet business. Either way, Magento was certainly the nicest looking of the bunch. The way it rewrote URL’s was really nice, and the administration control panel was well done. Unfortunately, it was missing quite a few features which supposedly were “coming soon”. Who writes a e-commerce application in this day and age and neglects to include Google Checkout availability? That just blows my mind.

That was a major deal breaker for me,  as at the top of my online to do list has been to buy a bunch of SSL certificates for everything I do online and abandon PayPal for Google Checkout while they’re still giving away free credit card processing.

 After ditching Magento, I figured I’d give commercial software a try. I really hate paying for PHP scripts. I can’t explain why, but it just feels wrong. After my 30 day trial of CubeCart is up, it is going to cost me $130 to buy the stupid software. Normally this wouldn’t be that big of a deal if I were getting something which I thought was absolutely remarkable, filled a need I had, and was sold by a company that provides excellent support. (Basically, like everything Panic sells.)

CubeCart sucks the least. I hate that I’m going to be giving some chump $130 to buy software because it sucks the least. In a world of really great freeware and open source alternatives, it takes really really great software for me to get me to open my wallet. I hate that I’m backed in to a corner with very few options other than buying something that sucks but works.

On the up side, it has some pretty nice stuff about it. It’s one of the few e-commerce packages that use a pretty good template system to design the look of your site. osCommerce and ZenCart would have you edit the raw PHP files themself to give your store a new look. Again, what is this, some kind of perl crapware from 1997? Web applications that don’t include a strong template system are like OS X applications that don’t include Sparkle.

You just don’t do it, OK?

The coupon codes in CubeCart are pretty useless, the USPS rate calculator required me to fix the script itself before it would even run (ON COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE) without error. The included templates were so stupid that it pretty much forced me in to writing one from scratch, and I’ve found I’m generally touching the codebase of this COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE that I’m PAYING FOR way too much.

The strongest thing about CubeCart is it seems to be very friendly in exporting data so that when something inevitably comes along that blows it out of the water (Like Magento, if they ever finish even half of their feature wish list.) it shouldn’t take much effort to migrate from it.

In the end, I guess I’m content with how CubeCart works, and I’m really happy with how the site looks. It’s always so much work to get the design ideas in my head on to the screen, but I think I’ve pulled off close to 90% of what I wanted to do with the look and feel of the site. I’ve still got a few widgets here and there to make still… but overall it’s pretty nice.

I’m going to Dekalb and my parents are going to Michigan this weekend for festivals with the ulterior motive of promoting the bejesus out of Old Man Hodapp’s Worldly Treasures. I’d like to think with proper promotion it will be wildly successful over the holiday season… but even if it isn’t, my total investment is $130.

It just sucks that the $130 went to a gaggle of idiots who just happened to build the app which sucks the least. 

Share this post! ^