On his blog today, Vinu Thomas spotlights one of the major up and comers in the PHP-based eCommerce software package offerings - Magento.

Magento is an ecommerce platform on PHP which is quite feature rich. This platform is based on the Zend Platform. You can take a look at a Magento store and the admin demo over at their demo section.

He mentions some of the features it has including analytics, catalog management, order management, payment integration with Paypal/Google Checkout/Authorize.net and some SEO optimizations.

You can find out more over on the project's website and download your own copy or peruse the forums to get to know the community around this popular app.

php|architect has announced the release of a new book - the Guide to Programming Magento, now up for preorder:

We're happy to announce the upcoming release of php|architect's Guide to Programming Magento, the first comprehensive guide for developers who want to learn more about the Magento e-commerce platform.

The book, by Mark Kimsal shows you how to install and successfully deploy a Magento installation on your website. The preorder is available right now for a 15% discount and the full PDF version will be released on May 15th, 2008 (print on May 31st). Check out the product page for more information and to reserve your copy today.

On the Developer Tutorials website, there's a new guide that steps you through the installation of a simple e-commerce platform available for free from Devellion Limited.

In this tutorial, we will get an introduction to CubeCart, created and distributed by Devellion Limited. Their flagship product is one of the easiest low-cost e-commerce solutions available, and is growing in popularity. Note that CubeCart is not technically open source, since the code cannot be freely redistributed. On the other hand, most of the code is not protected using encoding, and can thus be read and understood.

They go through the selection process - picking which version of their software is right for you - and the installation, configuration and how to verify that everything's up and running smoothly. Screenshots are included to help along the way.

While frameworks seem to be popping out of the woodwork, Mike Willbanks has noticed something lacking - a good e-commerce framework that helps the developer do simple things like work with shopping carts or connect with payment APIs.

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.