Literally hundreds of open source and commercial PHP-based ecommerce solutions exist, yet only a select few will adequately meet the aforementioned requirements. If you're currently exploring a PHP-based ecommerce project, consider starting your investigations by learning more about these five prominent solutions.

The five that made the list were:

• Magento
• LemonStand
• osCommerce
• PrestaShop
• UberCart

For each he gives a brief overview of what it has to offer and includes links to the official demo for you to try it out before making your decision.

Today, we are going to take a look at the Shopping Cart library for CodeIgniter. This useful class allows us to add and remove items to a shopping cart, update them, and calculate prices. I will demonstrate how you can build a simple shopping cart system with the help of this library.

This is the latest in their "CodeIgniter from Scratch" series so, if you're not overly familiar with the framework, you might need to go back and start from the beginning and work your way up. The screencast steps you through the shopping cart creation and an image of the end result is also included. You can also download the source to make it easier to follow along.

Late last year CodeIgniter v1.7.2 was released with a lot of improvements and bug fixes. This version is now compatible with PHP5.3.0, they added is_php() to Common functions to facilitate PHP version comparisons, modified show_error() to allow sending of HTTP server response codes, and all internal uses now send proper status codes, Form helper improved and a new class which we are about to cover in this tutorial the Shopping Cart Class.

They walk you through some of the basics that the shopping cart class has to offer - adding items, removing them, updating the current item list. They show you how to create each piece of the MVC puzzle - the Product controller, a Cart controller and two basic views, one for the cart and the other for the products. They didn't create a model because they're not hooking it into a database/backend resource.

In the latest installment of this ongoing PHP series, I'll show you how to build a shopping cart using PHP, session handling, and the Prototype JavaScript library. The cart allows users to add and delete products from the cart, as well as change cart quantities. And of course, the interaction is seemingly instantaneous, allowing for the user to continue shopping without waiting for the page to reload.

They start from the ground up - making the database tables, inserting some data - before writing up the simple PHP class with methods like deleteFromCart and getCart. This lays the foundation for the next article in the series where they add in a splash of ajax to make it a bit more user-friendly.

This tutorial is meant to show how GoLive users can integrate their PHP/MySql dynamic data with PayPal to create a simple online store with some advanced pricing features. This tutorial assumes that you are already familiar with using dynamic content in GoLive and aren't too terrified of working with source code.

They start with the SQL to hold the item information (including price) and show briefly how to set it up with the Inspector helper in GoLive. They show how to grab the HTML off of the PaylPal site to link to the object and how to make this add it to the shopping cart on the PayPal website. To finish it off and make it look a little nicer, they also show how to add images to the layout for each of the items.

So here is my question, besides the really shitty shopping cart objects out there is there any true components for a framework that utilizes this functionality? I say shitty shopping cart objects because just about every single open source PHP shopping cart has some of the worst design aspects I have ever seen.

His complaint is that most of the shopping cart software out there is really just procedural (or bad) code shoved into classes and called good. He suggests a more patterned approach - maybe using a Factory on top of a base abstract model.

In the latest installment of this ongoing PHP series, I'll show you how to build a shopping cart using PHP, session handling, and the Prototype JavaScript library (introduced in an earlier installment). The cart allows users to add and delete products from the cart, as well as change cart quantities. And of course, the interaction is seemingly instantaneous, allowing for the user to continue shopping without waiting for the page to reload.

He creates the database table first (bottom up approach), then moves to the PHP code to handle the request/responses for the shopping cart, and with a little bit of session magic to connect the cart to the user and the Prototype tossed in, the cart is complete.