Just a few days back I had mentioned that I am in love with Magento . While surfing through the website, I noticed that they have maintained their record from last year by winning the ‘Best of Open Source Enterprise Applications (E-Commerce) from Infoworld.

The awards “recognize the best free and open source software the world has to offer to businesses, IT professionals, and productive individuals who rely on computers to get work done.” Find more about the Open Source Awards on their website .

PhpLinkdirectory script has come out with version 4 , which they are currently releasing as a “Beta” offering, ala Google . The script does come out with very many new additions , but to tweak it for bugs and client reports and feedbacks, the official / final release will come in few weeks.

The current version offers the new “widgets” , which professes to make many custom modifications and plugins easily add-able with the existing software. Some of the mentioned widgets are for displaying the latest articles, latest links, popular links etc on the left right column Or displaying streams of Twitter tweets, and Alexa graph and Compete score. As per the last post on the site, there exist 17 readymade widgets available for download.

Find more details of the upcoming features on the website. To stay tuned for other updates subscribe to our feed.

We do custom scripting, development of shopping carts. Something I have noticed many times that requirements of shopping carts and ecommerce websites for different clients vary . While some may like a feature rich website along with a feature full admin panel, there are some clients who are more at ease with a simplistic approach and do not always very high end web store necessities. For clients who have a fixed idea on what they want, and even know of ready made shopping cart software such as osCommerce and Zencart or xCart etc, we do not usually offer a custom php mysql shopping cart solution. We rather suggest that we customize their open source application to match their look and feel or make it work as they want with maybe even some plugins and modifications / contributions.  But that was yeaterday , or last year .

With the advent of Magento , with its amazing look and feel , frontend , backend and readymade featuresets, I am totally blown off – have very little thing to say – why someone should not have it . Whatever I can say or something you may hear elsewhere , I can say is less ; It’s features speak volumes of its amazingness. With allready 500,000 downloads completed in January, and being mentioned in various developer blogs worldwide, over 115K registered community users, support forums in over 10 languages it would be foolishness not to follow it more closely and actively participate in its growth and build up one’s portfolio on the platform. And thats exactly what I have taken up to do .

Magento Ecommerce

vBulletin has always been a very revered product and one of the most commonly used forum software over the years. In the past 1-2 years different vbulletin sub versions in the 3.x series have given us lots of features to play with and also led to the official addons, such as Blog , Project Tools which maybe not as popular as its predecessor , but definitely picked up user interest. With the last few versions, vBulletin also has come up with the idea of introducing a community script and not just a forum software only( not my favourite though ) and also profile customizations.

But recently vbulletin website and forum also seems top be proceeding towards vBulletin 4 , their next major version. Some of the key improvements which they have announced as of yet includes :

• Cross content search system , facilitating centralized search for forum posts, blog entries and comments and any other supported products
• Better style templates and systems to make more semantic coding and adherence to CSS from the base templating system
• A better look and feel for the base product also using semantic markup
• SEO urls and search engine friendly options
• Options to include advertisements inherently in the script itself
• and a centralized attachment system

Features like these make you clearly feel that they have understood one of the points I had pointed out earlier – that it is time to stablize the main product and spend more time on improvements for the forum administrator. While additional features do sell the products, it is improvements like these that make the customer / forum administrator happy. From the official mini site for this release, I quote

Development efforts are prioritized towards those areas that can provide real, tangible benefits to our customers, at all times with an eye toward maintaining and enhancing the performance and reliability expected of a vBulletin product.

Although they have not yet given any pricing indication, but surely that can come . What they have definitely mentioned that the code is being rewritten. There is still no alpha or beta and no exact time given for us to view it.