On 9/12/07, Chandrashekar Babu <lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If you are going to deal with heavy customization and/or completely
non-conventional website layout/design - its not going to be easy
on drupal (unless you are an expert on PHP and internals of drupal).
Again zen cart fits all your requirements.
E-commerce engine is a plugin for jhoomla and jhoomla is not
e-commerce centric solution. For e-commerce centric requirements have
a look at zen-cart which has a light weight cms built in. Zen cart
website http://www.zen-cart.com/ is an example of what zencart can do
(it uses no cms and whole website is built on zen cart engine).
I did mention about 'Joomla' (not 'jhoomla') if I was correct.
Let me rephrase it this way - Joomla *is* designed to be more
easier to rapidly integrate and deploy corporate sites, community
portals, and *also* e-commerce portals with minimal development
effort.
Most e-commerce portals simply wont do with merely a shopping
cart, which is just the technology aspect. There are other things
that demand higher priority when it comes to deploying e-commerce
portals. Some of which I can immediately think of are as below:
- Customizability and ease of integration
- Support for non-conventional layouts/web design
- Fastest learning curve and developer resource availability
- Effort involved in integration of site design/layout
- Effort involved in deployment and maintenance
- Proven stability and scalability (which is debatable)
- Availability of easy integration plugins like Product Catalogue,
Affiliate Marketing extensions, choice of payment processing
engines, highly customizable virtual shopping mart extensions,
auction modules, EDI extensions, forms and reviews modules,
customer interactivity plugins and lots more.
Most of these features are available as plugins/extensions that can
be easily integrated into Joomla - which is why I mentioned Joomla
to be a good choice for 'e-commerce centric' websites/portals. As
such, I did *not* mention that Joomla itself as an e-commerce centric
solution.
Of course, you can deploy Joomla on a personal website for merely
hosting a blog, or deploy Zencart to host a large-scale e-commerce
portal - its just a matter of how much of time/resource you are willing
to waste.