Webdistortion, a web design studio in Northern Ireland, recently reviewed nine different e-commerce platforms. All nine platforms reviewed were open source software packages.

With e-commerce webdesign really starting to take off, its never been more important to choose a platform which suits you as a developer (i.e. one that you can support) and one that will provide your clients with the features that they need to run a successful online shop.

There are a number of ways of getting a shop online, and we’ve focused primarily on open source e-commerce platforms here.

Those nine e-commerce platforms under review include: osCommerce, ZenCart, VirtueMart (Joomla!/Mambo), Magento, DashCommerce, CubeCart, X-Cart, LiteCommerce, and Shopify. If you're looking for a brief and consolidated review of open source shopping carts, then the Webdistortion reivew is a nice place for you to visit.

For those curious, I found this story via DZone.

Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce is a new book from Packt which will help users to sell online using the award-winning open-source Drupal web application. Written by Michael Peacock, this book provides the essentials of getting an e-commerce website up and running with Drupal.

Drupal is a free and open-source modular web application framework and content management system (CMS) written in PHP that can run in many environments; including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. Drupal e-Commerce is a free, open-source, feature-rich, flexible package of modules that seamlessly adds full e-Store capabilities to Drupal.

Last week marked the official release of Magento 1.0, an open source ecommerce platform. Magento has been on my radar scope for some time thanks to those who have left comments about it here. Since, I likely will have need of a good shopping cart this year for a planned project, I've decided to put some focus on Magento. I will be removing Mambo from my top 30 "CMS Focus" list to make room for Magento. My apologies to Mambo fans.

Magento isn't just a "shopping cart" but attempts to also be an "ecommerce platform". Magento recognizes that it needs to improve and introduce additional features, but for a 1.0 version the variety and quantity of features are impressive. Some of Magento's well rounded features include analytics and reports, RSS feeds, site and content management tools, search engine optimization, promotion tools, and multiple theming.

Bitrix, Inc. is proud to announce the release of Bitrix Site Manager CMS V6.5, a new version filled with marvelous enhancements and new leading-edge features, including Web 2.0 tools, site wizards, Web services, photo gallery and other utilities. Bitrix Site Manager is a Web content management system that provides stable functionality and security, and promotes cost-effective growth of clients’ Internet projects.

Harald Ponce de Leon: "We are proud to announce an advancement of the osCommerce 2.2 release series with the new osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2 Release Candidate 2 release. This second release candidate addresses issues introduced in the previous release candidate release and addresses longer termed issues from 2.2 Milestone 2."

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"If you run an ecommerce site, you may want a content management system (CMS) to help manage your online product line. VirtueMart, available under the GNU GPL and fully integrated with Joomla!, does that and more. It provides a full ecommerce solution in a LAMP environment."

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In 2006, I helped bring a friend's Fish and Tackle store online using open source osCommerce. The project was ugly in both appearance and code as I was merging a legacy site with an SMF forum together with the osCommerce software. As I indicated back then, while osCommerce was functional I was not pleased with the software. I kept on thinking how much easier this project would have been if I had used what I consider as modern CMS's. Specifically, I was thinking Drupal and perhaps even Joomla!.

I have slowly learned in the past few years that merging applications, applications never meant to be merged together, never really results in a good project. I knew even then I never really wanted to try bridging osCommerce, SMF, and Drupal into a single site. Yes, you can end with something fully functional and even pleasant to the eye, but as the site's Web developer you always have this nagging feeling that something is missing and you could have done better. If I had to do the fishing site over again and decided on using Drupal, I would only consider the eCommerce module for Drupal or Ubercart.

Joomla! Cash is a new book from Packt, which has all the ingredients to make money making Joomla! websites. Written by Brandon Dawson and Tom Canavan, this book is a fast and easy read, taking the reader from the inception of an idea, to a fully working cash-generating website built on Joomla!

Joomla! is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that helps users build websites and other powerful online applications. It is an open-source solution that is freely available to everybody. Joomla! is used all over the world to power everything from simple, personal homepages to complex corporate web applications. Out of the box, Joomla! does a great job of managing the content needed to make your website sing.

Since dotCMS is a "new" CMS that we're focusing on, I'm needing to add some content. This was announced a couple weeks ago, but still worthy of posting if you're trying to catch up like we are on what dotCMS is all about.

dotCMS 1.5.1 released – Open Source CMS, Web CRM and eCommerce - Dotmarketing released dotCMS 1.5.1 today which provides over a 150 fixes and improvements to a feature rich, open-source J2EE enterprise class web content management system.

New features included in this version of dotCMS are: