Does anyone else use Interchange?

or did you get put off by the learning curve.

[jam13]

We've been using Interchange for developing ecommerce sites for about 18 months now, and having got over the (very steep) learning curve find that it does just about anything we want it to.

However when we were initially looking around for a suitable cart, it was certainly not the most approachable bit of software we looked at. In fact the primary reason we ended up going with IC over something like OS-Commerce was that it was the only cart that we could find that supported inventory on product options.

So I'm curious to know if there are many other people out there that are happy with Interchange or whether the majority who try it give up and go for something easier.

[jam13]

I guess the silence says is all.

[andy_boyd]

Got a site running with IC, very adaptable. There really is no limits as to what you can do with it.

Although I do agree, there is a steep learning curve.

[danieljean]

I considered it, but it was coded in Perl. Ack! Have you ever tried to read someone else's Perl code?

[Ian_Cowley]

Yep I use it - for everything! Well everything that involves users and databases.

It does have a steep learning curve but it's immensely powerful for all sorts of applications including Ecommerce. Took me about a year to become comfortable with it.

I havn’t come accross a feature related to ecommerce that can’t be pregrammed into an Interchange store. You can also make it very SEO friendly which in the current climate is very important.

It is written in Perl (although it's server side and compiled, very fast). You don't have to program Interchange in Perl it has it's own mark-up language (tags).

It's also got a fanstastic backend which can be customised to suit your needs very easily.

[epfantasia]

Me too! Have been running it for a couple of years now, and besides the learning curve, have absolutely no complaints. Anything you can think of, with a little bit of work, can be accomplished.

On a side note, does anyone know if there is a stat package that can read the usertrack logs, or can be adapted to?

[Ian_Cowley]

Regarding the usertrack logs... What you need to do is write the tracking stuff to a database, including the session ID etc. Then you could run a report on the database to produce a log file in any format you want and run a third party tool on that log.

[epfantasia]

What you need to do is write the tracking stuff to a database, including the session ID etc

Done all that, actually in the middle of writing something to query it all at this moment. BTW, have found it very valuable to save the referer string as an extra TrackPageParam in usertrack.