inmyplace.info » Software

10 best opensource shopping carts

admin — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 11:59:52 +0000

There are plenty of paid solutions for creating an ecommerce website, but there is also a wide choice of free, scalable and robust opensource shopping cart scripts available. I will mansion the best 10 of them right here below.

Magento is a very professional shopping cart system, supporting SEO friendly URLS and a lot of extras which you normally wouldn’t get in an opensource script. It offers easy installation, clean coding and simple template customization as well as unlimited pages, products and customers. A wide range of payment gateways are supported as well as a lot of shipping options are built-in.

jCart is a free Ajax shopping cart thatâ€™s easy to install and customize.

Based on jQuery and PHP, jCart handles visitor input without reloading the page and is fully functional even without javascript.

Ubercart is an open source e-commerce solution fully integrated with the leading open source content management system, Drupal, winner in two categories of the Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards. This is a killer combination for anyone looking to build a community around a product, sell access to premium content, offer paid file downloads, and much more, all while maintaining a seamless connection to your users.

Prestashop is a really robust, feature rich shopping cart with a vibrant community and lot of features which you normally get only for a paid shopping cart solution. Probably one of the best choices out there.

OpenCart is an open source PHP-based online shopping cart system. A robust e-commerce solution for Internet merchants with the ability to create their own online business and participate in e-commerce at a minimal cost. OpenCart is designed feature rich, easy to use, search engine friendly and with a visually appealing interface.

Cubecart is a free shopping cart solution, but the new version v4 is no longer opensource but you have to pay for it if you want to upgrade. Cubecart has a wide range of supported payment gateways and is pretty straight-forward if you are not yet similar with shopping cart systems. Definitely a good choice if you want a simple shopping cart solution.

osCommerce is the “grandfather” of all open source shopping cart solutions. This is probably the most feature rich shopping cart solution available, there are plenty of plugins available to extend it for nearly any usage. Also the community is very helpful if you run into troubles.

AgoraCart is a very popular shopping cart solution written in Perl/Mysql. Despite the pretty complicated Perl-Language, the installation and the customization is pretty easy, as there is a good installation guide and as well a nice css-editor available which makes it possible to edit your templates right from online from your browser.

If you are more a designer rather then developer, then zencart is for you. It allows really easy customization through XHTML-templates, also has a newsletter manager, gift certificates, banner manager…. There are also a lot of addons available to easily extend the functionallity.

Storesprite is free as long as you don’t remove the copyright. It features easy installation, simple customization and a lot of features which are right build into the core installation. It also supports a wide rang of payment gateways and sweet features like customer ratings and comments.

The better Google Chrome: Iron respects your privacy!

admin — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 16:57:32 +0000

Soon after Google released the new Chrome Browser, I installed and tested it, and I really liked the speed of the browser and the concept of handling each individual tab as a sandbox. But I got concerned about my privacy, so I stopped using Chrome a few days later.
Now I found a Chrome based browser which respects the privacy. It is called Iron. Read here what they say about there release regarding privacy:

Problem		Chrome		Iron
	Client-ID		Chrome creates a unique ID through which a user can be theoretically identified.		does not exist in Iron
	Timestamp		Chrome remembers up to the second exactly when the software was installed.		does not exist in Iron
	Suggest		Depending on the configuration, each time you put something in the address line,this information is to Google to provide suggestions.		does not exist in Iron
	Alternate Error Pages		Depending on the configuration, if you have typed a false address in the adress bar, this is sent to Google and you get an error message from Google’s servers.		does not exist in Iron
	Error Reporting		Depending on the configuration, details about crashes or failures are sent Google’s servers.		does not exist in Iron
	RLZ-Tracking		This Chrome-function transmits information in encoded form to Google, for example, when and where Chrome has been downloaded.		does not exist in Iron
	Google Updater		Chrome installs a updater, which loads at every Windows in background.		does not exist in Iron
	URL-Tracker		Calls depending on the configuration five seconds after launch the Google homepage in background		does not exist in Iron

from: http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php

And best of all, this browser does include an Adblock filter!!

Pictomio – just wicked and a lot better then Picasa

admin — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 14:47:43 +0000

A few weeks ago I applied to be a beta tester of the new Pictomio PictioGeo Addon and software. Luckily, I was chosen and after paying 50 Euros a few days later I received a package containing a Bluetooth GPS tracker and a license Key to enable the Pictomio PictoGeo Addon.

I have to admit that until now I was not able to test the Geo Logger, as my camera broke recently and so I had to buy a new camera (Canon EOS 1000d). So I hope I get this camera asap to get my hands on the PictoGeo as well.
In the meantime, I have sorted all my pictures (especially the one from my travels in Australia) and used some really wicked features of Pictomio. Here are some really great things I love about this software:

Ability to add EXIF geo position to a photo using either GoogleMaps or Microsoft Earth
Ability to upload photos to different photo sharing sites, including flickr, facebook, picasaweb, locr, photobucket
Image rating
Automatically rotation of images according to EXIF data
EXIF data editing (if you really need this…)
Ability to view photos on Google Maps or Microsoft Earth and if using PictoGeo ability to view an entire trip
Carousel image view
Image tagging

So, that’s it for the moment. As soon as I get to use the GeoLogger, I will post an update.
Here a screenshot of the Pictomio Software window:

Easy way to get new ringtones for your iphone for free

admin — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:04:24 +0000

There are many softwares out on the market to create ringtones. Most of them are difficult to use, and then they can not create the ringtones for the iphone directly and you have to convert them first.
The easy way to create and/or download new ringtones is to go to audiko.net. Either you can use the search function on the homepage and download the ringtone directly (you can download it in mp3-format or directly as a m4r-ringtone for use with the iphone). There are already loads of ringtones available, all created by other users, and before downloading, it is possible to listen to them.

However, to create a ringtone from a mp3-file, just follow this easy steps:

Choose your song and upload it (takes about 2-4 minutes, depends on your bandwidth)
Once uploaded, use the flash interface to choose the part of the song which should become your ringtone.
Click on “Create Ringtone” to start creating ringtone
Input the songs name, once done, you can download it either as a mp3 or m4r

That’s it! Easy, no?

heidiSQL – a great tool to manage your mySQL database

hmorandell — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:25:19 +0000

After migrating from a dedicated server to my new hosting over at www.mediatemple.net, I was looking for a easy to use but yet powerful tool to migrate my existing databases from my former host to the new one.
I was browsing the web, when I run over a tool called heidiSQL. I had a look at their webpage, and the tool looked very promising. I downloaded the latest version, and was surprised how easy and straight-forwarded it is to use. Especially the data restore worked very well. So if you’re looking for such a tool, grab your copy!

problems sending emails using yahoo’s smtp server

hmorandell — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:01:27 +0000

I used yahoo’s smtp server (smtp.mail.yahoo.it) a long time for sending mails through Thunderbird, but recently it stopped working. I always received error messages that my mail was not relayed, but didn’t get a specific error code.
So, after looking around for a long time, I had to change my smt configuratin to the following:

smtp server: smtp.mail.yahoo.com
Port: 465
Secure Connection: SSL
Username: Userid without @yahoo.it

And this works again.

[Postfix] – warning: mail_queue_enter: create file maildrop Permission denied

hmorandell — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:39:48 +0000

After trying to setup postgrey, I had a lot of warning messages in my mail.log file like this:

May  7 12:26:19 gandalf postfix/postdrop[6065]: warning: mail_queue_enter: create file maildrop/713410.6065: Permission denied
May  7 12:26:29 gandalf postfix/postdrop[6119]: warning: mail_queue_enter: create file maildrop/724102.6119: Permission denied
May  7 12:26:29 gandalf postfix/postdrop[6065]: warning: mail_queue_enter: create file maildrop/734104.6065: Permission denied
May  7 12:26:39 gandalf postfix/postdrop[6119]: warning: mail_queue_enter: create file maildrop/744803.6119: Permission denied
May  7 12:26:39 gandalf postfix/postdrop[6065]: warning: mail_queue_enter: create file maildrop/754805.6065: Permission denied
May  7 12:26:49 gandalf postfix/postdrop[6119]: warning: mail_queue_enter: create file maildrop/765505.6119: Permission denied
May  7 12:26:49 gandalf postfix/postdrop[6065]: warning: mail_queue_enter: create file maildrop/775505.6065: Permission denied
May  7 12:26:59 gandalf postfix/postdrop[6119]: warning: mail_queue_enter: create file maildrop/786207.6119: Permission denied

To get rid of this messages, I had to do the following:

root@gandalf:/var/spool/postfix# postfix check
postfix/postfix-script: warning: not owned by group postdrop: /var/spool/postfix/public
postfix/postfix-script: warning: not owned by group postdrop: /var/spool/postfix/maildrop

SOLUTION:

root@gandalf:/var/spool/postfix# /etc/init.d/postfix stop
root@gandalf:/var/spool/postfix# killall -9 postdrop
root@gandalf:/var/spool/postfix# chgrp -R postdrop /var/spool/postfix/public
root@gandalf:/var/spool/postfix# chgrp -R postdrop /var/spool/postfix/maildrop/
root@gandalf:/var/spool/postfix# postfix check
root@gandalf:/var/spool/postfix# postfix reload

Nice alternative to Picasa

hmorandell — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 12:42:08 +0000

I was browsing the web, looking for some iphone stuff, when I came across a website which offers a image managing program similar to Google Picasa and ACDSee.
The clue of this program is that you can browseyour image collection like you can do it on your iphone:

The program has a lot more features, just to mention some of theme:

Image Management
Image Library Management
EXIF Editor
Liquid Zoom (yes, another feature you might now from your iphone)
3D Image Carousel
Image Rating
Slideshows
…….

And best of all, you get this program completely free of charge! Here you can grab your download:

Pictomio

Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address – Apache – HTTPD Error

hmorandell — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 14:47:16 +0000

I was getting the following error on one my servers, after updating apache2 and php5

 Starting web server (apache2)...(98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address [::]:80
(98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs
failed!

This is what I did to fix the problem

netstat -lnp | grep '80'#output
tcp6       0      0 :::80                   :::*                    LISTEN     18712/apache2

In my case the output showed that apache2 was already using the port, although no sites was working and it was not even possible to stop the apache2 daemon. I ran the following to learn more

ps 18712
PID TTY      STAT   TIME COMMAND
18712 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

I killed the apache2 process, which was blocking everything

kill 19712

and restarted apache

/etc/init.d/apache start

and everything was working fine again. Hopefully this is useful for someone..

ZooomrRSS-plugin updated

hmorandell — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 07:00:09 +0000

After some days, it seems that the guys over at zooomr.com have fixed there problems with the rss feed. I updated my zooomrRSS plugin, so now it works again.
If you’re using it already, you only have to overwrite the existing file and do not need the change the configuration. If this is the first time you’re using it, please have a look at the configuration page here: http://inmyplace.info/2006/09/02/my-zooomrrss-plugin-a-first-release/

Download here