eCommerce
The Top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems
As a web designer working online since Netscape 1.0 building sites for clients, the biggest change I’ve seen in thirteen years in the industry is the advent of the Open Source Content Management System as the preferred platform for development. Nothing is more illustrative of the change between first generation web standards and the web 2.0 evolution than the CMS trend. Providing a great base for social networking, including blogs, forums, wikis, image galleries, comment logs, ecommerce, voting, bookmarking, tags, and innumerable other extensions along with traditional web publishing methods, the CMS is the preferred platform for most web designers building sites today. Open Source has led to the establishment of huge, user-powered development communities that are dynamically changing and constantly upgrading, offering free software, themes, and modules for building professional web sites. The ubiquity of the shared hosting LAMP – Cpanel - Fantastico set up has popularized the CMS far beyond even the developer/design community.
The top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems:
- Drupal
- WordPress
- Joomla
- Media Wiki
- Liferay
- TYPO3
- Moodle
- Dolphin
- Pligg
- Movable Type
Honorable Mention:
Xoops, Geeklog, e107, Mambo, Nucleus
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Magento – The New Standard in Open Source eCommerce
ECommerce Platform for Growth
Magento has only been around about 6 months now, but in that short time has vaulted to become the preferred choice for ecommerce development for many web designers working with Open Source solutions. What is the reason for this vast popularity and is it justified? The biggest factor is a combination of design improvements with an administration panel that includes everything you need to manage any kind of ecommerce site. Magento has the professional, Web 2.0 look many designers love, and it sets itself apart immediately from OScommerce, Zen Cart, and the other existing ecommerce systems with well laid out templates and easy set up of site sections for your catalog display. Magento offers a shopping cart with a large number of payment gateways integrated out of the box, product comparisons, tags, polls, internationalization support, advanced reports, analytics, and SEO optimized URLs. There is support for coupons, discount codes, catalog management, wishlists, cross-sells, and related items. You can create orders from the admin section for offline or call center sales, and managing shipping is easy with built in calculation for USPS, UPS, DHL, Fed Ex, and other delivery services. Magento will also automatically calculate sales tax on orders and supports multiple currencies on the same site.
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