Another boxed CMS or a worthy alternative?
Greetings to you habouiers!
Ehhh, I haven’t been here for a long time and didn’t write ... And in the meantime, life goes on, everything changes, including my favorite eCommerce, for which new tools constantly appear.
For all the time I have been working in this niche (and this is more than 5 years) I have tried a lot of engines, both opensource and commercial: Magento, Bitrix, Insales, OpenCart, Shop-Cart, Simpla, Zen Cart and so on. And that's what I came to ...
First, finished products (CMS are our favorite), when it comes to launching a standard store in a short time without special customer requirements and misunderstandings about what TK is and why it is, this is good.
')
I will not now talk about all the 50 shades of sensations (sometimes there were more of them) that righteous developers experience when they see the code of some PHP CMS (as the most common today) when they need to be customized. This is a separate topic for conversation ...
If you do not delve into the technical details, CMS is an excellent tool that allows you to save time in development and satisfy 90% of the average customer’s wishes, while remaining positive in terms of time and finances and nerves.
Secondly, I do not like opensource.
What newcomers do: I downloaded a distribution kit, picked it up, added addons like the same opensource, or wrote it myself - the site seems to be ready, but this is done “done on my knee” a mile away.
Such a choice is due to the seeming simplicity - a couple of modules and a template, if the solutions are really suitable, and the terms are burning.
And, thirdly, the more I came across the stories of colleagues, the more I was disappointed in this occupation. And in most developers working with opensource. Moreover, sometimes this disappointment concerns not only the products themselves, but also opensource CMS in general, and sometimes life. I think many people know this feeling.
As a result, if at the beginning of my career I was frankly disdainful of commercial engines, then, after gaining the above experience, I sometimes began to think about using them and even apply them on individual projects, hoping to find among them the very “silver bullet” for a painless implementation perversions of customers and dealing with the deficiencies of opensource.
Therefore, in this article I would like to share with you my experience with one of such products called CS-Cart , which I happened to encounter lately.
Oddly enough, to get acquainted with this engine forced Bitrix. Just because the client really wanted a scalable engine, and I dislike Bitrix from past experience. I went to see what alternatives there are at the moment. Then he caught my attention, because held a stable second place after Bitrix.
Since it cost even less than the required distribution of the 1C brainchild (24,500 Russian rubles for CS-Cart versus 35,900 for Bitrix), the good was received because, as it turned out, my client as a result didn’t care about the platform, as usually happens.
The main thing is that the CMS made it possible to bring all his “Wishlist” to life as quickly as possible and without unnecessary gestures on my part.
What attracted me to CS-Cart?
Firstly, as it turned out, this is a domestic product with a rich history (on the market since 2005) and excellent Russian-language documentation , supported by a mass of video tutorials. Moreover, many videos are built right into the CS-Cart admin area on pages where viewing them will benefit the end user:
Low entry threshold
A separate word is deserved by the section of the documentation for developers (of course, in Russian), which describes in detail the file and structure of the CMS code itself, modules and themes, add-on development standards, REST API organization principles and much more.
Under these conditions, my developers were not able to deal with CS-Cart. Moreover, this applies to both the admin interface and the code.
This moment also made me wonderfully pleased with the customer, who, like everyone, wanted to do everything himself after the start of the store and not spend money on consultations and improvements.
Customize me completely
As the client got to me, as I said, the standard one, his other obligatory requirement was the possibility of independent editing of the exterior of the display case.
It was necessary to edit both the structure of the pages, and the text of individual text blocks and the inscriptions on the controls.
And here again CS-Cart helped me great, because He had all the necessary tools out of the box.
First, a visual editor for the main theme elements working in WordPress, in which, when changing storefront styles, the results are instantly displayed on the screen, without actually being applied without saving the edits:
The content editor also implements the click-to-edit principle popular in many CMSs and looks like this:
To change the structure of page elements, there is also a tool very similar to WP Visual Composer that allows you to construct page layouts yourself, adding new elements and moving existing ones:
Well, finally, the engine has a designer mode that allows you to change the source code of the engine templates responsible for certain structural interface elements. It works like this:
In addition to the above, CS-Cart also has visual editors for email distribution templates and documents, which can be used both in letters and on information pages.
One more client of my client was a whole set of marketing tools. In addition to the above-mentioned email newsletters, we also needed SEO settings for the site as a whole, as well as for individual pages, promotions, bonuses, banners, the display of pending purchases, a one-click order. In general, full stuffing.
And in this moment, CMS also made me incredibly pleased, because he has it all in stock. Moreover, out of the box, and not due to the installation of modules of dubious quality, as it happens on opensource platforms.
Regarding the expansion of the functionality of this CMS, everything is standard: for functionality, there are modules that work on the hook system, and not the vQmod / ocMod crutch, cursed by OpenCart developers, and graphical themes.
There are, however, not so many extensions, as in opensource engines, since their few CS-Cart partners create them, and not just anyone :-) But, but you can be sure of their code quality due to strict moderation, and they will be needed only in emergency cases, since Most of the required features are available by default.
In addition to all the above, this engine out of the box also has a lot of interesting things like logging in via social networks with the help of the familiar oAuth, blogging, mass loading of goods, synchronization with Yandex.Market, etc., which I didn’t spend much time on lack of demand in the framework of the order being described, so I did not go deep into their settings.
CS-Cart was good. So good that I often slowed down on my local computer, which does not have a special performance. Moreover, I am talking now about navigating the storefront and performing typical user actions in the online store.
Those. in the same way, it will also slow down most if you don’t turn off the extra modules and rent the server (better, of course, dedicated) is more powerful.
This is, in fact, a private minus of the majority of modern CMS, which have to pay for the abundance of functionality out of the box. Well, especially commercial engines, because by default, they have an order of magnitude more possibilities than opensource counterparts.
The second disadvantage for me personally was the rather high price of the license (the benefit is that it is at least a lifetime) - 24,500 Russian rubles for the basic version and 36,000 for the distribution with the more uncleaned UniTheme window theme (cost $ 200 separately) and additional modules.
Add-ons are also quite expensive (from $ 20 to $ 600 for individual modules and topics), but again, I repeat, you will not need them often.
Well, the last thing I didn’t like was the technical and moral backwardness of the engine itself.
While in the modern IT world, the ideas of SPA and isomorphic web applications are moving forward with might and main, CS-Cart still has a banal maladaptive admin (even on an adaptive display window, neither Bootstrap nor other front-end frameworks smell). No js-frameworks and client rendering, only jQuery, only hardcore.
However, CSS styles are written using LESS-processor, which is not bad.
There is also nothing to do on the backend: the standard PHP stack (stably works on both 5.6 and 7.2) + MySQL.
The engine is self-written, but the code is well structured through MVC and using the Smarty template engine to create views, so it’s easy to understand and maintain it.
Thus, on the one hand, working with CS-Cart in terms of professional growth does not smell like a serious profit. But, on the other hand, this is an excellent option for novice developers due to detailed documentation and low entry threshold due to the technology stack used, which, moreover, will allow you to quickly deal with orders, leaving time for self-education.
And for experienced users - a good opportunity to launch large-scale eCommerce projects in a fairly short time.
As a result, it took us 4 days to launch a serious enough functional site of an online store based on CS-Cart, while a similar creature killed OpenCart for me from 2 weeks of time, I don’t even stutter about Bitrix.
Ehhh, I haven’t been here for a long time and didn’t write ... And in the meantime, life goes on, everything changes, including my favorite eCommerce, for which new tools constantly appear.
For all the time I have been working in this niche (and this is more than 5 years) I have tried a lot of engines, both opensource and commercial: Magento, Bitrix, Insales, OpenCart, Shop-Cart, Simpla, Zen Cart and so on. And that's what I came to ...
First, finished products (CMS are our favorite), when it comes to launching a standard store in a short time without special customer requirements and misunderstandings about what TK is and why it is, this is good.
')
I will not now talk about all the 50 shades of sensations (sometimes there were more of them) that righteous developers experience when they see the code of some PHP CMS (as the most common today) when they need to be customized. This is a separate topic for conversation ...
If you do not delve into the technical details, CMS is an excellent tool that allows you to save time in development and satisfy 90% of the average customer’s wishes, while remaining positive in terms of time and finances and nerves.
Secondly, I do not like opensource.
What newcomers do: I downloaded a distribution kit, picked it up, added addons like the same opensource, or wrote it myself - the site seems to be ready, but this is done “done on my knee” a mile away.
Such a choice is due to the seeming simplicity - a couple of modules and a template, if the solutions are really suitable, and the terms are burning.
And, thirdly, the more I came across the stories of colleagues, the more I was disappointed in this occupation. And in most developers working with opensource. Moreover, sometimes this disappointment concerns not only the products themselves, but also opensource CMS in general, and sometimes life. I think many people know this feeling.
As a result, if at the beginning of my career I was frankly disdainful of commercial engines, then, after gaining the above experience, I sometimes began to think about using them and even apply them on individual projects, hoping to find among them the very “silver bullet” for a painless implementation perversions of customers and dealing with the deficiencies of opensource.
Therefore, in this article I would like to share with you my experience with one of such products called CS-Cart , which I happened to encounter lately.
Oddly enough, to get acquainted with this engine forced Bitrix. Just because the client really wanted a scalable engine, and I dislike Bitrix from past experience. I went to see what alternatives there are at the moment. Then he caught my attention, because held a stable second place after Bitrix.
Since it cost even less than the required distribution of the 1C brainchild (24,500 Russian rubles for CS-Cart versus 35,900 for Bitrix), the good was received because, as it turned out, my client as a result didn’t care about the platform, as usually happens.
The main thing is that the CMS made it possible to bring all his “Wishlist” to life as quickly as possible and without unnecessary gestures on my part.
What attracted me to CS-Cart?
It's all my dear
Firstly, as it turned out, this is a domestic product with a rich history (on the market since 2005) and excellent Russian-language documentation , supported by a mass of video tutorials. Moreover, many videos are built right into the CS-Cart admin area on pages where viewing them will benefit the end user:
Low entry threshold
A separate word is deserved by the section of the documentation for developers (of course, in Russian), which describes in detail the file and structure of the CMS code itself, modules and themes, add-on development standards, REST API organization principles and much more.
Under these conditions, my developers were not able to deal with CS-Cart. Moreover, this applies to both the admin interface and the code.
This moment also made me wonderfully pleased with the customer, who, like everyone, wanted to do everything himself after the start of the store and not spend money on consultations and improvements.
Customize me completely
As the client got to me, as I said, the standard one, his other obligatory requirement was the possibility of independent editing of the exterior of the display case.
It was necessary to edit both the structure of the pages, and the text of individual text blocks and the inscriptions on the controls.
And here again CS-Cart helped me great, because He had all the necessary tools out of the box.
First, a visual editor for the main theme elements working in WordPress, in which, when changing storefront styles, the results are instantly displayed on the screen, without actually being applied without saving the edits:
The content editor also implements the click-to-edit principle popular in many CMSs and looks like this:
To change the structure of page elements, there is also a tool very similar to WP Visual Composer that allows you to construct page layouts yourself, adding new elements and moving existing ones:
Well, finally, the engine has a designer mode that allows you to change the source code of the engine templates responsible for certain structural interface elements. It works like this:
In addition to the above, CS-Cart also has visual editors for email distribution templates and documents, which can be used both in letters and on information pages.
Do not let marketers dry out
One more client of my client was a whole set of marketing tools. In addition to the above-mentioned email newsletters, we also needed SEO settings for the site as a whole, as well as for individual pages, promotions, bonuses, banners, the display of pending purchases, a one-click order. In general, full stuffing.
And in this moment, CMS also made me incredibly pleased, because he has it all in stock. Moreover, out of the box, and not due to the installation of modules of dubious quality, as it happens on opensource platforms.
Regarding the expansion of the functionality of this CMS, everything is standard: for functionality, there are modules that work on the hook system, and not the vQmod / ocMod crutch, cursed by OpenCart developers, and graphical themes.
There are, however, not so many extensions, as in opensource engines, since their few CS-Cart partners create them, and not just anyone :-) But, but you can be sure of their code quality due to strict moderation, and they will be needed only in emergency cases, since Most of the required features are available by default.
In addition to all the above, this engine out of the box also has a lot of interesting things like logging in via social networks with the help of the familiar oAuth, blogging, mass loading of goods, synchronization with Yandex.Market, etc., which I didn’t spend much time on lack of demand in the framework of the order being described, so I did not go deep into their settings.
What did not like?
CS-Cart was good. So good that I often slowed down on my local computer, which does not have a special performance. Moreover, I am talking now about navigating the storefront and performing typical user actions in the online store.
Those. in the same way, it will also slow down most if you don’t turn off the extra modules and rent the server (better, of course, dedicated) is more powerful.
This is, in fact, a private minus of the majority of modern CMS, which have to pay for the abundance of functionality out of the box. Well, especially commercial engines, because by default, they have an order of magnitude more possibilities than opensource counterparts.
The second disadvantage for me personally was the rather high price of the license (the benefit is that it is at least a lifetime) - 24,500 Russian rubles for the basic version and 36,000 for the distribution with the more uncleaned UniTheme window theme (cost $ 200 separately) and additional modules.
Add-ons are also quite expensive (from $ 20 to $ 600 for individual modules and topics), but again, I repeat, you will not need them often.
Well, the last thing I didn’t like was the technical and moral backwardness of the engine itself.
While in the modern IT world, the ideas of SPA and isomorphic web applications are moving forward with might and main, CS-Cart still has a banal maladaptive admin (even on an adaptive display window, neither Bootstrap nor other front-end frameworks smell). No js-frameworks and client rendering, only jQuery, only hardcore.
However, CSS styles are written using LESS-processor, which is not bad.
There is also nothing to do on the backend: the standard PHP stack (stably works on both 5.6 and 7.2) + MySQL.
The engine is self-written, but the code is well structured through MVC and using the Smarty template engine to create views, so it’s easy to understand and maintain it.
Thus, on the one hand, working with CS-Cart in terms of professional growth does not smell like a serious profit. But, on the other hand, this is an excellent option for novice developers due to detailed documentation and low entry threshold due to the technology stack used, which, moreover, will allow you to quickly deal with orders, leaving time for self-education.
And for experienced users - a good opportunity to launch large-scale eCommerce projects in a fairly short time.
As a result, it took us 4 days to launch a serious enough functional site of an online store based on CS-Cart, while a similar creature killed OpenCart for me from 2 weeks of time, I don’t even stutter about Bitrix.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/353208/
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