Category: Tech

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A Wiki and a Shopping Cart

This week I had some good luck installing a few web applications. The first was a small wiki program called PmWiki. I was looking for something a little less feature rich then a standard MediaWiki installation. I really only wanted a single editable wiki page. PmWiki had more then I wanted but it installed easily and was easy to hack into a simplified state. I still haven’t gotten clean URLs to work but that was probably because I didn’t want to play with my .htaccess late last night.

Next up was Zencart. Zencart seems to be the premier open source shopping cart system on the web. I’ve always wanted to play around with it so I installed the latest stable version and started modifying it and adding my comic book collection. Zencart installed easily and without problems but stripping it down of the various unneeded buttons and links was a bit time consuming. Many of the options are hidden in many menus and the process doesn’t seem very intuitive. That being said Zencart seemed very feature rich and had everything an online store would need to conduct business on the web. Setting up the various modules was very easy and soon I had the store accepting paypal via my account and handling shipping accordingly.

I didn’t get to mess around with templates and zencart as much as I wanted. Code wise the template seems all over the place and I’ve already jumped to a half dozen places commenting out portions I didn’t want. I probably should have just picked another default template and installed it.

Both programs are free open source, so overall no complaints whatsoever. If I really had any problems I could just fix them. Isn’t open source fun?