madmac - 4:23 am on Sep 6, 2005 (gmt 0)

Zen Cart is alright. A very big problem with it though is that the code is nightmarish, which you just have to find ironic because many in the Zen Cart community will openly criticize osCommerce for having bad code, when Zen Cart's code is just as "amateurish." In some places, Zen Cart's code is even more horrifying than osCommerce, IMO.

And it really is a slow dog, much of which can probably be attributed to the horrific code and lack of knowledge of the team [I'm not saying you need to be a professional programmer to write an application, but with the wealth of knowledge on the net, they should at least take it upon themselves to learn more about PHP]. Also the team seems to be more concerned about packing in as many features as they can than with fixing existing problems with code [to me that should be a warning sign, but hey that's just me]. Take for example the main index page. On my local dev server, it takes PHP over 4 seconds to parse the page, and it contains 950 queries. Now I don't expect super performance from my local dev server, but most PHP apps are parsed in around 1 second or less. And well, regardless of the parse time, 950 queries for 1 page is ludicrous. It is insane. There is absolutely no reason to need that many queries for 1 page, and no reason it should take PHP that long just to generate 1 page.

You'll probably be ok with Zen Cart for a low volume small site. But it probably will not handle loads very well due to it being so CPU and SQL intensive.

I'm not trying to dog Zen Cart here. It is decent for what it is. Just don't expect miracles from it.