NopCommerce (www.nopcommerce.com) is the closest thing to Magento except that it runs on Microsoft’s .NET instead of the LAMP stack.  It’s still a long way to go for NOP to catch up with where Magento is at, but if you have used Magento, you will see A LOT of similarities in NOP, as I have a feeling that the developer behind NOP based its implementation off of Magento.  NOP will be strictly for the developers using Microsoft Technology (C#, ASP.NET, MS SQL 2005, IIS), if you can go either way, PHP or .NET, I suggest you go with Magento, simply because it’s more mature and has a whole lot of plugins ready for use.

That being said, the reason why I built CarGear.com using NOPCommerce, is specifically for the reason mentioned above, I needed to build this project using Microsoft technology simply because my technical resources for this project is more versed in .NET than PHP.  A secondary reason would be the fact that since NOP is less mature, it has a more raw framework to build stuff on top of it.

CarGear.com sells auto parts, collision replacement parts, and everything else you can think of that deals with cars.

All feedback welcomed.

blog posting, e-commerce, evaluation cargear.com, NOP Commerce

Look around on the net and search for a digg-like software to create a social voting news platform, you will most likely find Pligg as the popular choice of open source software that does pretty much what Digg.com does.

After evaluting the platform, I find the platform easy to implement, with one catch being that at its current state, you can’t install it locally or even on a production server under a virtual directory.  For example you will not be able to install it under http://www.52my.info/digg, instead you will need to install it at the root of its own domain, so here’s my site: http://news.52my.info

Obviously, I have localised it for Chinese audience..and the back-end admin have made in-line translation easy and the use of smarty template made customizing easy (I stuck with the wistie default template, as I found it to be good enough).

Enjoy.

blog posting, evaluation, recommendations clone, digg, news.52my.info, pligg

I have always uploaded my Magento database via PHPMyAdmin (I know I know, it’s for novices)…but an incident yesterday with SimpleHelix (my current Magento hosting provider) forced me to learn how to import database and use SSH.  The whole incident started two days ago when I tried troubleshooting a new Magento installation, as the installation went through fine, but I kept getting error messages when I tried to view the front-end and when I tried logging into the backend; neither worked.  Tried googling on the web site for the error message (can’t remember what it was), but found no relevant errors…somewhat surprised, so I figure maybe it’s not a Magento issue. Read more…

blog posting, evaluation, technical notes FTP, Mysql, PHPMyAdmin, simple helix, SSH

The other day, I was approached by a long-time friend about building/developing a social networking web site…I was thinking to myself…are we still in 2005? We will not go into the business viability of this project, but instead, I am going to share a couple observations as I tried to do my initial due-diligence on the project.  Base on the project requirement, the client wanted something done in 45 days!! so time is precious, so I initially explored open source code base on .NET…nothing!! I can’t believe I found nothing…not even commercial packages…maybe I wasn’t googling hard enough, but I was surprised.

As I was reading a bunch of social network postings…the name Elgg kept coming up, so i took it out for a spin…downloaded and tinkered with it.  Installation was smooth, but after installation, I was a bit baffled…and i attribute this to me being spoiled by Magento and Wordpress.

After spending a couple hours in the admin and trying to figure out how to customize the software, I decided to give up for now…until the client decides to really go for this.

Couple observations that make open source a good open source. Things that Elgg lacked…

1. lack of good documentation from the people behind Elgg…most of the documentation are too general to be of any use.

2. user community is too small - discussion forum wasn’t very active

3. lack of plugins - there were some, but not enough plugins (again, i am spoiled by Wordpress).

Attached is a screenshot of a plain vanilla installation, nice and clean, but not enough plugins and documentations to ease the learning curve.

blog posting, evaluation elgg, open source, social networking