looking for advise for new wedding website

[shenbo]

We just registered a new domain name to start a wedding website for a specific culture/country. Wedding information pages (articles) will be added first, then product news page will be posted. Ultimately the website will be an e-commerce store that sells wedding products (invitations, labels, favors, etc). We hope the website becomes a platform that showcases our own designs, help the communication between us and our customers, then sell the products.

Can someone recommend a content management software and/or a shopping carts to use? The following features are important to me:
1. search engine friendly
2. free is best, but not required
3. custom invitations and custom labels service will be offered, so extra fields support is needed for the shopping cart
4. multiple images display for one product
5. product review feature
6. reader/customer comment feature
7. template support

Is it better to separate the content management software and the shopping cart?

Thanks a lot.

[bill]

Our Content Management [webmasterworld.com] Forum has a number of threads about different CMS systems. You might find some inspiration there. Another place to look is the opensourceCMS site. They have a number of platforms already installed that you can try out online.

[shenbo]

Thanks for the quick response. I checked that board and it seems Drupal, wordpress and Joomla are the most popular. I used Drupal a few years ago and liked it. It now has Ubercart integrated, but don't know how it works. The biggest concern for me is really about images and ecommerce.

[JS_Harris]

I really want to suggest a particular platform but I don't think that would be helpful to everyone who reads this thread so I'll offer a different solution.

Check out your competition, you'll want to know who they are anyway so while checking out their sites take note of what platform they are using and see if their site behaves as you want your site to behave. You'll probably find yourself saying "I like this feature from that site and this feature from this site" etc... that's your shopping list. Use the list to match against various platforms and make sure they offer the most important features on your list.

It's pretty hard to go wrong with any of the major content management systems these days but they are each a little different and people swear by different platforms.

[maximillianos]

Xcart and OScommerce are two that come to mind. They are shopping carts with the ability to add on other features (like reviews, etc).

I've used OScommerce, but not Xcart. OSCommerce is a pretty decent shop front.

[simonuk]

Zen cart is a spin-off of OScommerce and in my opinion is one of the easiest carts to customize. 10/10 from me.