The two worlds are diverging rapidly. Traditional enterprise software development (the kind associated with “programming in the large”) tends to be slow, costly, inflexible. Solution sales, marketing, and support tend to be correspondingly process-heavy and inertia-laden. The Web, on the other hand, is agile, fun, and friction-free. It has changed the way people look at computing. It has changed expectations (and conversations) around marketing, pricing, maintenance, support, and just about every other aspect of the enterprise-software experience.

Kas Thomas:  A reality checklist for CMS vendors.

I have spoken of MODX before and how much I like it. I have produced a serious number of MODX sites, from fully compliant government sites to tourist bodies, accredited training agencies, brochure sites and all of the way to online shops. I don’t think there is a site type I have not produced with MODX (but remember MODX is not an enterprise tool, it is great for small to medium sites as it does not support all of the features you may expect from products like Infoglue).

Maybe I should blog about Infoglue! One day soon perhaps…

So in the last month or so I have produced two ecommerce shops in a very short time frame. Both of these sites had the following features:

• the clients were in a rush (aren’t we all?)
• wanted AJAX style user interfaces
• both sites were designed by a third party (I am an Enterprise Architect and part time coder, NOT a web designer)
• had under 100 products to sell
• required online credit card processing (one wanted to use PayPal, the other wanted to use a proper merchant facility)
• needed a content management system to manage their site – this is a critical point as many cart systems out there mandate you must use their CMS and let’s face it none of them really have good CMS features! I prefer to leave content to the CMS and integrate my required features – HINT: ALWAYS look for a CMS that can allow for easy integration of functionality, you need to be able to loosely couple (but not at the cost of scecurity) functionality on demand!
• wanted an information rich site and not a horrible retail site like those ones you see based solely on ZenCart or OSCommerce (come on people design something a little more user friendly!) – this meant a focus more on CMS functionality rather than shop features
• had users of varying web knowledge and understanding, from the VERY bare basics to “I can actually do some PHP” degrees of competency.

So I hunted around and as the budget for both of my projects did not warrant the writing of a custom shop like I have done for other clients, I decided to try and find an off-the-shelf product. I purposely chose two different carts as I wanted to see how each of these products were to work with.

So I chose the following carts to implement as they both promoted easy MODX integration:

1. Treasure Chest: “TreasureChest is an easy to use eCommerce system for MODx CMS/F. It is a 100% MODx native shopping cart, product manager, inventory manager, shipping assistant, and sales tracking solution which uses PayPal Website Payments Standard for payment processing.”
2. FoxyCart: “Modern CSS + XHTML Ecommerce”.

Both products fitted the bill, well kind of…

Features

Treasure Chest:

• Works as a module for MODX, you can manage products and sales all in the Manager. Great!! You don’t need to have multiple accounts and manage your site in two places (in MODX and in a seperate cart site).
• Uses MODX placeholders and snippet calls. Very, vey easy to integrate, a little bit harder to customise.
• Great personalised support with direct contact with the developer who clearly cares about his product.
• Uses PayPal so it’s got good credit card security for your customers immediately!
• Fast, cheap, reliable and got me out of a bind with my client in no time.

FoxyCart:

• Way easy to integrate. So easy it’s scary. It also has an API if you are not happy with the standard way of doing things. Actually I would like to play with that some more.
• Very interactive and all AJAX. Looks very swish and their template system is pretty easy to work with.
• Supports a lot of different payment gateways. This surely has to be a headache for them but this of course enables a broader market for them to sell their product to.
• Pretty good documentation, though I found a number of examples in the forum don’t actually work. Maybe they need to flag example code with cart version compatibility?
• Once again FoxyCart was up and running in no time. Fast, very easy and pretty user friendly.

Gotchas

Treasure Chest:

• PayPal only – this is the single greatest gotcha, but if you are ok with PayPal then there is no problem at all.
• Product options are not very flexible as they overwrite each other. What does this mean? Just say I wanted to buy Widget A and selected red as its colour, if I now buy Widget A again and select blue (I want two Widget A’s in two different colours) both product selections will be aggregated and made blue. So instead of having two Widgets in two different colours (one blue and one red), I have two Widgets in blue!
• Integration document needs some more work.
• Some more cart display variations would be nice, FoxyCart has some great methods for site integration. But what can I say here? Treasure Chest is $19.95 once off, FoxyCart is $15 a month. Perhaps with more sales Treasure Chest will expand. Don’t get me wrong here, Treasure Chest product display is infinitely variable but it’s just tracking the status of your cart which could be more flexible.
• Needs to be more flexible around product imagery, I used Template Variables to help out here.
• Reporting could use enhancement.

FoxyCart:

• I have some security concerns with this product because of it’s loose integration. For example what is to stop a clever user saving your cart page down, altering the costs in the forms and then buying the product at a heavily discounted price? There are a couple of other things I could point  out too, but for small transaction volumes human auditing will pick this up. FoxyCart needs to look at product parameter encryption like PayPal does.
• I found support a little slow, I had problems with their integration with eWay (turns out my shop name had an illegal character in it of all things – better validation is required here obviously). I was trying to go live and they took 36 hours to respond and then promised a fix within 3 days. That had me scared, BIG TIME, but I will acknowledge here that not only did they get the problem sorted as soon as I made some noise it also only took moments to fix when they responded. So in the end, good job guys! (it was only those 36 hours before I got a response which was a little scary).
• A monthly fee! Well this is a good thing and a bad thing. It made me happy because my client had ongoing support after their engagement with me, but I just don’t like subscription based software.
• It’s not as easily configurable as they like to say unless you are a jQuery coder. I have no problems with this, but others out there might.
• Does not manage inventory without the use of snippets and their API.
• The biggest issue with FoxyCart is non-compliance with PCIDSS when taken out of the box. I had to do some jQuerry work to make it a bit more compliant. I was a little scared to push the boundaries of this issue too far.
• You need to log into two sites, MODX for product management and FoxyCart for sales reporting and cart configuration. A little confusing for newbies.

The point here I guess is that both carts have slightly different target markets but both are great products when you know what you are looking for, so in summary:

So am I happy with both products? YES.
Are they both easy to use? YES
Are they both customisable? YES
Would I use them both again? YES
Should you use them? YES (assuming your requirements are similar)

Out of interest I also integrate these MODX sites with ListMessenger and iSearch. Both of which fill a niche and work really well.

I cannot give MODX a big enough wrap.

So I was thinking after releasing my latest MODX site that I have never seen anyone offering high quality training for MODX users. There is a simple explanation for this (and almost every other CMS really):

every implementation is unique.

Any great product can become a dog if implemented poorly. This is the sad truth. So through my association with wwwtraining, I have encouraged the development of a MODX editor course:

Editing your MODX site, a course with features like:

• creating and editing pages
• editing values and parameters
• simple tips to make your site run faster
• how to enable MODX SEO features
• creating users
• and just about anything else MODX can do!

wwwtraining can customise training for you and even offer tips to improve a poor implementation if you want it.

BTW – I am also a big fan of Infoglue but that is my preferred Open Source CMS for enterprise grade clients. I have a number of government clients using it.

Over the years I have been involved in a lot of professional development, training and presentations, on both sides of the lectern. I have also presented professional training courses for CAVAL at LaTrobe University over a long period that saw me travel to Singapore, New Zealand and most of Australia.

I look back at my time at CAVAL with great fondness and I truly mourn the fact that I cannot be involved as much as I would like to be any more. My wife was diagnosed with cancer and that severely limited my availability for a short period of time. The CAVAL programme is great and the people are even better.

I have also travelled to other countries and cities for commercial organisations. I guess professional presenting is a real love, and I want more. Don’t get me wrong, I still get in front of audiences pretty regularly, but CAVAL was an organisation I loved being involved with.

But happily my circumstances have changed. I have been invited to get involved in wwwtraining, who describe themselves as: “on demand web training” and “web tutoring & hands-on help”. I will be helping to develop their courses and at the moment their materials include:

1. Tutor lead
   • Blogging with WordPress
   • cPanel for beginners
   • DreamHost introduction
   • Hands on DirectAdmin
   • Plesk site management
   • Safe web surfing for families
   • Uploading sites with DreamWeaver
2. Self-paced learning
   • Better results with Google
   • Hosting jargon
   • How to FTP
   • Web lingo

While some of these courses already include areas of my expertise, I hope to add things like web accessibility, technical project management and others.

Oh, if there is anyone out there looking for a skilled presenter and trainer, let me know!