Recommended reports
Ecommerce Platforms Buyer's Guide 2013
Econsultancy's Ecommerce Platforms Buyer's Guide is aimed at companies who are investigating the ecommerce technology market, with profiles of 34 leading vendors. The report analyses trends in the overall ecommerce marketplace, as well as providing tips for those looking to find the right ecommerce platform.
Content Management Systems (CMS) Buyer's Guide
An invaluable resource for those investigating the market for content management systems (CMS), with profiles of 21 leading vendors, the latest market trends and tips and pitfalls for buyers. The 283-page report provides details on the issues and trends affecting this sector, as well as information about best practice and tips for successful CMS implementations.
managing director at reverse delta
16 February 2009 22:36pm
Hi
I'm looking for a good quality open source CMS which has the ability to sell digital downloads (PDFs) as well as real products.
I've looked at Magento -- but this is too much full-blown e-commerce for the needs of this site -- only a small section of the site will be selling stuff.
I've had a look at Joomla, but the e-commerce seems too basic and Joomla looks too cumbersome a CMS for the clients needs.
Has anyone got any advice of something that could fill the gap?
Perhaps a good e-commerce plugin for WordPress that anyone can recommend?
The site admin will need simple wysiwyg control over current site pages, plus ability to add pages to a section (i.e. top level menu item).
Needs to be open source, GPL or similar.
Thanks
Dave
Director at Connectage Ltd
17 February 2009 11:37am
I know you've rejected Joomla but we've built some huge sites with it and I think it's a great product. We've built our web platform around it.
We've also released some products to allow others to do similar at http://www.connectage.com. And we're using them ourselves to build some cool sites with lots of content and thousands of registered users.
One of these, Cartage, combines Joomla with another open source product Zen Cart. The combination is powerful - rich content management, slick e-commerce including downloads.
CEO at Econsultancy
17 February 2009 17:17pm
I don't know if Squiz does have e-commerce capability but perhaps worth looking into or talking to them for advice.
Managing Director at Shine Marketing
17 February 2009 23:14pm
Have a look at Expression Engine and its Simple Commerce module, or maybe use a 3rd party solution that includes a basket as well as teh checkout & payment (e.g. Mal's)
All depends on what you want from the rest of the site really?
Consultant at Southern Content
18 February 2009 10:43am
Wordpress is a good option for a search & user-friendly CMS for small to medium sites and there are multiple ecommerce plugin options.
Can't personally recommend best options but http://www.geekzone.co.nz/mufasa/6149 is a useful review of ten relevant plugins.
Hope this is helpful
MD at LexisClick
18 February 2009 23:43pm
Joomla is a solid CMS and is generally quite user friendly once you have got your head around how it is structured and how best to work with it. Plenty of our very non technical customers have got to grips with it, with a small amount of telephone training.
Drupal is also a very good CMS system and logical for end users. It has a much simpler and probably less polished interface than Joomla but is a great system. There is quite a bit of ecommerce activity in the community including:
http://www.drupalecommerce.org/
http://www.ubercart.org/downloads
If you are looking for a scalable CMS first and ecommerce second, both Joomla and Drupal are very solid GPL CMS's with good core coding. The ecommerce modules available for both have the functionality for downloadable files. Anything you can't get off the shelf should be quite straight forward to develop with their strong communities and APIs.