| Internet Development |
 |
 |
 |
|
How different are we really? All websites need contact forms, user interfaces, design templates, style sheets, user / content / contact / media management systems. What makes us unique is our content. Architecturally, we have more in common than not. Why continue to reinvent the wheel? In the current soft economy, we all need to do more with less. Managing multiple, highly complex websites has become about managing libraries, integrating components and researching vendors to determine and implement the best available solution for a specific situation at a given time. We are big believers in the benefits of utilizing collective intelligence. We install, integrate, skin, configure, and extend open source and commercial solutions. Utilizing collective intelligence, our most recent project complete redesign took a single developer a single week. Our client got the world's most popular open source content management system skinned with a commercial template and customized with their branding and content in 43 billable hours. How sweet it is. Authoring an application from scratch would be like doing research without using reference books. For us, the debate over the value of hand coding / authoring from scratch is over. The active debate is "Open Source vs Commercial". |
Magento is an open-source ecommerce web application launched on March 31, 2008. Magento supports installation of modules through a web based interface accessible through the administration area of a Magento installation. Modules are hosted on the Magento eCommerce website as a PEAR server. Any community member can upload a module through the website and is made available once confirmed by a member of the Magento team. Modules are installed by entering a module key, available on the module page, into the web based interface.
Zen Cart is an open source online store management system. It is PHP-based, using a MySQL database and HTML components. Support is provided for several languages and currencies, and it is freely available under the GNU General Public License. Zen Cart branched from osCommerce as a separate project. Beyond some aesthetic changes, the major differences between the two systems come from Zen Cart's architectural changes (e.g. a template system) and additional included features in the core. Among the modules already included are a Gift Certificate/Voucher module which allows to create, send and manage the digital coupons. A module to sell downloads (pdf or other media files) is included as well. 
Drupal is a well respected open source content management system notably used on the recelenty updated whitehouse.gov. Drupal is flexible and accessible, while being fairly easy to use as a powerful solution for a wide variety of projects. A powerful feature unique to Drupal is the ability to assign permissions at a granular level. Rather than being limited to groups, individuals can be assigned unique access levels. This was undoubtably a prime consideration behind the administrations decision to redeploy http://whitehouse.gov utilizing Drupal, 
Joomla! is considered, at the time of this writing, arguably the most popular open source content management system in the world,