X-Cart Gold : Sample Page

What do we need?

C S Robertson Packaging had quite specific requirements in regards to shipping methods and the payment gateway that they use and this is where my problems finding a suitable e-commerce solution started. The first issue was finding a system that would use the WorldPay payment gateway as standard, unfortunately because most e-commerce sites are designed for the US market they don’t come with WorldPay as a standard payment gateway and to my frustration I found that most don’t even have it as an additional add-on unless bought from a third-party at extreamly high prices and I don’t really want to trust the clients payment details with a third-party that I know nothing about.

The second issue was with the shipping method, again due to the majority of e-commerce sites being US based they had great features for delivery methods through UPS or other US based shipping companies but none for UK companies or for what I needed custom shipping methods.

C S Robertson having their own delivery vehicles charge specific rates for delivery based not on weight or dimensions like most companies they charge per item + a reduced fee for each additional item being delivered. This caused a big head ache for me as most of the e-commerce sites I found would charge per item but not with a reduced price for each additional item. The only solution I could come up with was to recode the software myself but I really didn’t want to have to go down this route if I could avoid it and that’s when I found X-Cart.

X-Cart Features

X-Cart has some great features as standard and a great choice of third-party developers who produce add-ons or modules as they call them and an extensive members forum that s packed full of ways to customise X-Cart to its full potential.

• Wide range of e-commerce features
• 100% PCI-DSS compliant
• Flexible “tableless” design
• Easy text content modification using WYSIWYG tools
• W3C XHTML 1.0 compliance
• SEO friendly product catalogue
• Web-based administration
• On-line payment gateways support
• Real-time shipping cost estimation based on product dimensions
• Inventory management
• Full multilingual support
• Reports management

My Thoughts

So what do I think? well lets look at some of the things that are important to me as a developer and admin for this e-commerce site.

Support

X-Cart only has support via email or its online ticketing system which you need to pay for. From what I can tell they seem to be based out of Russia. They can take some time to answer your tickets in some cases more than 3 days to get a response from anyone which from an admins point of view isn’t great. They also charge quite a lot for the support points. below is a list of their prices

A typical support ticket normally costs 60 points. I have found that I have had to argue my case about these charges a few times as I have put support tickets in and while waiting for a reply managed to find a fix myself or via the community support forum and went back to tell them I have fixed it myself and closed the ticket only for them to respond to me my ticket after me telling them i have fixed it and they still charge me.

The techs themselves seem to be very knowledgeable and can fix most problems once they get round to it.

They also have a really good community forum which is much more helpful and has some great users that will be more than happy to help you with any problems you have with your setup or customisation.

functionality

X-Cart has some great features including the ability to have custom shipping which works perfectly for our needs.It also uses the Worldpay payment gateway as standard so for UK users this is a big advantage. It’s just a simple case of entering your Worldpay details in to the module and off you go. You can even run it in test mode which will allow you to put payments through including the payment gateway process without actually using real credit card details. This makes life alot easier when trying to work out some of the kinks when first setting it up.

It is written in a code called Smarty which is a template engine for PHP which is supposed to make editing your templates (.tpl files) slightly easier than using straight PHP. To be honest I would have preferred straight PHP but I haven’t really got round to learning all that smarty has to offer.

Category management is good too as is the S.E.O built in to X-Cart. It very simple to add new products and additional custom fields for your products.

The main problem I have with X-Cart is the ability to make it look nice and modern, yes I could spend hours adapting the current themes but what I really want is a site with nice templates like WordPress that I can just pick and choose from then start to edit them myself to make them the way I want.

Another issue I have had is with the updating of the site from one version to the next. In most cases all you have to do is use a patch and upload it then apply the patch from the admin area but most of the time this doesn’t work as you have had to edit some of the common files to make things work the way you want which then breaks the update process. It could be made a lot better if the updates just updated core files which were separate from the skins and then you could have an auto update process like WordPress.

Conclusion

All and all X-Cart Gold is a great e-commerce solution if you already have plenty of PHP/Smarty skills but for a beginner or someone who just wants it to work I’d stay well away. It has great feature but doesn’t look great and needs lots of fiddling to get it the way you want it but the product management, stock control, shipping and reporting functions make it stand out as a class in it own right. You really can’t get a more comprehensive shopping cart without forking out lots of cash on a designer to build it for you or buying a full e-commerce ready-made system.

Rating

It’s so simple you will wonder how you lived without it.

What I am talking about is a program called Screen for Linux. Screen will keep what ever your working on open even when your connection drops out. It’s very simple to use and has some great features.

So lets see if we have screen installed on our server. The easiest way to do this is to just type : “which screen“

This will then tell you where and if screen is installed on your server.

If you get something like this then screen is installed, if you just get a black result then its not installed and you will have to install it. Try “apt-get install screen“

after you type “screen” your command prompt will usually just go to the next line, it looks like nothing has happened but thats screen started.

ok so we can now go ahead and do our work as usual for example you are downloading a file from the internet.

we then decide that we want to start coding up a new css file for your favourite site. All we have to do is open up a new screen window. To do this all we do is press “Ctrl + A” then “c” this will open up a new window that we can start coding in.

To swap between the screen all we have to do is type : “Ctrl + A” then “n“. you can open as many windows as you need and swap between them in various ways using the ”Ctrl + A” shortcut. You can see all the different commands by typing “man screen“.

So then out of the blue it happens again, the connection drops, normally you would have lost all your work and would have to log in to your server again and delete the swap file and start your download all over again but not when your running screen.

just log back in to your server then type : ”screen - ls” to list any open screen windows.

Then to re-attach that screen just type : “screen -r PID” so for this example it would be ”screen -r 28772” you will then be back in to the selected screen and it will be just as you left it so your download will still be downloading and your vim session will still be active. Just remember that you need to re-attach all the screens before you can swap between them again.

To close the screen your working on but leave it running in the background type: ”Ctr + A”  and “d” and you will revert to one of your other screen windows or the shell if you only have one.

To kill the session you can either type “exit” or type ”Ctr + A”  and “k” on the screen window you have open.

I found this massively helpful and increased my productivity greatly. Give it a try and hopefully you will love it as much as I do.

I hope to update the site on a regular basis with product reviews and general banter on tech and motorbikes, a strange combination I know but if I could combine them both in my life I would.