On PHPBuilder.com today, Jason Gilmore has posted a look at five PHP-based ecommerce solutions with a wide range of feature sets and larger support and usage across the web.

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.

New on the Ibuildings techPortal site, there's an article from Rupert Jones that walks you through the installation of Magento Enterprise on a linux-based platform (LAMP).

Magento is an increasingly popular e-commerce platform due to its sheer flexibility, wide range of features and the facility to customise it relatively easily. In this post we will examine how to get Magento Enterprise set up and running. We assume a debian-based LAMP stack but these instructions could be adapted for any other platform as required.

He shows you how to install ionCube first (a requirement for Magento) and how to get the latest Magento package, unpack it and set up some permissions so the application can write to things correctly. From there it's a simple database creation and Apache config away from being setup and working.

New from the Ibuildings techPortal today, there's a tutorial from Michael Davey looking at using Gearman with Magento to do some of the "heavy lifting" of queuing jobs from inside the tool.

With most web applications, there comes a time where there is a need to perform either CPU or I/O intensive work based on user actions. Whether processing uploaded files, or performing system-wide database updates, developers are increasingly turning to Gearman as a simple way to hand off the heavy lifting to another server to be performed asynchronously.

He's created a basic module that can be downloaded and dropped right into your Magento install to make it work with your Gearman queues. He includes an installation guide and a bit of code on how to make a sample job to run an event and the class sitting on the other side for the worker to use in handling it.

Following his Day Camp 4 Developers event, Cal Evans needed a way to release the videos and materials from the day long even to those that paid to attend. Obviously, a download link just wouldn't do, so he went looking for something a bit more powerful and WordPress-y.

It sounds like such a simple thing; just put them up for download, right? Not really. Let's look at the actual requirements: Shopping cart to allow me to eventually sell the videos, a way to let my existing ticket holders "buy" them for free. (Coupon codes), a way to keep the real location of the files hidden so people don't just go download them. Those were the biggest items. Beyond that I was willing to either sacrifice or code it myself.

After searching around and trying out a few solutions, he decided on eShop ("it's good, not great) a WordPress plugin that lets you set up a quite configurable ecommerce website. It also includes some basic statistics features, uses the custom post types to configure products and lets customers sign into the site to handle their own options.

According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone, the voting state of the Packt 2010 Open Source Awards has officially started and you can cast your vote in one of many categories (and maybe win a prize for your efforts).

The nomination stage is now closed and voting has begun in the 2010 Open Source Awards. [...] You can cast your vote here: http://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home/voting-stage.

The categories for the awards this year are:

• Open Source CMS Award
• Hall of Fame CMS
• Most Promising Open Source Project
• Open Source E-Commerce Applications
• Open Source JavaScript Libraries
• Open Source Graphics Software

If you want more information or to cast your vote for any of the projects in these categories, go over to the Packt voting page and get your opinion heard.

On the Tech Chorus blog there's a new book review of a Packt Publishing book called "PHP 5 e-commerce Development" (by Michael Peacock). The reviewer covers some of the contents of the book as well as two main points - who should read it and what they could have done better.

You should read the book if you are learning PHP and new to e-commerce. Beginners trying to utilize out of the box software like Drupal CMS or OSCommerce tend to be frustrated sooner or later.

He discusses the contents of some of the chapters - building pages, creating whis lists, payment gateway integration. He also mentions a few things that the author might have done a bit better at including taking his claims of a "killer framework" down a few notches. He recommends taking all advice in the book with a grain of salt.

On WebReference.com today there's a quick guide to helping you get an e-commerce site set up easily for your WordPress installation. It uses the WP e-Commerce plugin to make it all work.

The readymade e-commerce tool that Jason used is actually a plug-in for WordPress called WP e-Commerce. The basic version is free, and you can buy additional modules. In the following sections, I will explain how you can install and set up your e-commerce site using WP e-Commerce.

They show you how to install the plugin, set up a theme (a WordPress layout that makes the most of the plugin) and how to set up things like the products, variations on them and configure some of the settings that come with it.

In case you missed the whole series of posts that Matthew Turland did on the Magento e-Commerce platform, he's summed them all up in a new post to the Blue Parabola blog.

The new kid on the PHP e-commerce block, Magento, has gotten a good amount of attention leading up to and since its initial release. Earlier this year, I was entasked with doing an analysis of its features and thought it might make for an interesting series of blog posts. What you see here is the result. Comments are welcome, thanks in advance for your contribution.

Topics in the series covered the catalog browsing, customer service, shipping and SEO features the popular software has to offer.

On the RawSEO blog today Justin has posted five reasons why he thinks the OSCommerce e-commerce platform is a nightmare.

"The goal of the osCommerce project is to continually evolve by attracting a community that supports the ongoing development of the project at its core level and extensively through contributions to provide additional functionality to the already existing rich feature set." Why shouldn't I use it?

Here's his five reasons:

• no separation of logic and presentation
• difficult to integrate into an existing design
• security
• cannot have multiple sizes of image previews
• admin navigation issues

He includes some other options, too, just to give you an idea of what else is out there.

The Magento eCommerce platform is quickly becoming one of the favorites, but it's also known for being bit tricky. This new tutorial from NETTUTS.com shows you how to take some of the first steps - installation, working with the admin interface and themeing.

Magento is the next generation of eCommerce! It is incredibly well architectured, fully flexible, scalable, and fun to work with. If you've ever thought about creating an online shop, Magento is your choice! Today we are going to install it locally with XAMPP Lite and review the essentials.

The tutorial also helps you to install the XAMPP package - a Windows all-inclusive web platform that includes Apache, MySQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin. Once its started, you can create the database Magento needs and import its data. Log into the admin, change a few settings and you're all set.