About CSS Cart ecommerce software
CSS Cart has been designed to be a small yet robust web standards shopping cart. I’ve been developing web applications for almost four years, and have tried almost every major open-source application out there. After developing several carts in osCommerce, I decided that it was time to write my own cart that was template based, and could easily be modified by editing some basic XHTML and CSS. Of course every site is different, so I honestly never expect this cart to work for everyone out of the box, however I feel the core code is solid and modifications will be pretty straight forward.
The code base was started from scratch, but many of the concepts have been borrowed. There are parts of osCommerce that I really enjoyed working with and some of those parts were the inspiration behind the modules for payment and shipping. I also enjoy the structure of Ruby on Rails, so I’ve based the layout of the core code in a similar fashion try to make sure that core functionality is separated from the presentation of the cart. Being a computer science major I had to think out of the box a little and I think I came up with some pretty cool solutions to some tricky problems. When a page is loaded a category tree is built, from this tree the left-nav, breadcrumb, and urls are all generated. This makes it very quick and efficient to generate a lot of data without multiple queries to the database. Mix that with some recursive function calls and you’ll find that this cart is pretty snappy!