8 years of rock'n'roll with X-Cart
Pros
- For everyone. From small to huge business you get everything out of box. Just setup company details, payment and shipping methods and you are ready to go.
- Upgradable. There are many plugins one can integrate with X-Cart. Over time, many of them became part of the software, and you are one click away to enable them.
- Well organized code. It uses Smarty template engine, which I find great, specially for debugging (famous Webmaster mode).
Cons
- Creating new plugins the way X-Cart wants is maybe not complicated, but hard to implement because there are no hooks. One has to manually change each file. This is similar to patching the core and therefore one has to know basics of web development.
- Even if you get everything styled correctly with base skin, there is a bunch of unused styles you have to cope with. Start skin should be much cleaner. You may find thousands excess lines of code.
Return on Investment
- Flexibility in presentation as well as functionality
- Full open source software allows for unlimited possibilities with the store function, though some developers who create modules do encode their modules which have errors in their code which therefore can't be fixed
- A fully functional professional level application at a fraction of the cost of similar applications such as magento.
Other Software Used
WordPress, Joomla!