I haven’t used OpenCart specifically, but I have used other systems like it before. Here’s the basic issue with combining it with a Freeway-designed site. First, yes, you would provide a link from the main site to the OpenCart site, and while that cart might live in a subdirectory of your main site, like example.com/shop or something like that, it is best thought of as a completely separate site, sharing nothing with your main site. Every page that is presented within the shop area will be composed out of multiple templates, populated with variable data from the shop system’s database. Creating these templates with Freeway will be a journeyman-level code-wrangling task, not something that can be done using an Action or two. No single HTML page will exist inside the shop area, only partial templates like a header and a footer and one or more body parts. You’ll need to read HTML and decipher which part of the visual page belongs to which part of the code, then slice it up so the cart system can recombine it back to your original layout. And adjust all the paths to images and other external resources. Not for the faint of heart.
Mals cart is a much different thing. It uses specially-crafted URLs (which the various Freeway Shop Actions write for you) to allow items to be added to a generic hosted cart, and checked out through that hosted shop interface. You design your product pages in Freeway, use the Actions to set up the “Add to cart” or “Buy Now” links, and you don’t need to go spelunking in the code. Your store pages are plain HTML pages, just like the rest of your site, with nothing tying them to a specific methodology.
Now the kinds of stores that the two systems are good for are slightly different. Yes, you can use either of them to do a basic commerce site. But if you wanted to keep track of inventory – say you only had 22 widgets to sell, and you didn’t want to get up every hour of the night to see if they had all sold and you should put up the “sold out” page – then you need something like OpenCart, where you maintain your inventory in a database and everything is automated. On the other hand, if you’re selling one-of-a-kind items, the sort of data entry required of OpenCart and its brethren (creating an SKU for each item, just as you would if you were selling 10,000 jars of jelly) will feel like overkill.
Ultimately, which one you choose will be driven by a three-way calculation: “How specific are your branding needs” (perfect Freeway layout vs. “stock” template), combined with “How skilled are you with a text editor and coding in general”, combined with “How is your product and inventory structured”. Oh, and don’t forget, “How busy do you plan to be?” One sale per minute is a lot different from two sales per week. The amount of automation you require may force trade-offs that you wouldn’t need for a more leisurely or just lower-volume enterprise.
Walter
On Feb 22, 2014, at 12:25 AM, Ted wrote:
I am not a professional web developer. I am using Freeway Pro 6 to set up sites for my own business uses, so I am pretty functional with Freeway Pro, but not expert by any means. I want to set up an ecommerce site for the sale of products, and I know that the choices should be driven largely by our specific commerce needs. Is it possible, without going into the specifics, for experienced folks here to give me your opinion of the use of Mal’s eCommerce compared to Opencart? I know that Mal’s is partly integrated with Freeway Pro. If I want to continue to use Freeway for my site development and use opencart, would I need to simply provide a link on the Freeway created site so visitors could go to my Opencart commerce site? I am concerned that I do not have a broad enough understanding of the nuts and bolts of this. I do not want to set up one approach or the other and regret my choice later due to my ignorance of pitfalls of either choice. If you are willing to give you
r opinio
n or experience of either approach, I will appreciate your help. Thanks - Ted
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