Open Cart Development – Features, Design and Installation
By Lucid Softech IT Solutions | CMS, open cart devlopment, PHP, 18 Sep 2015Integrated, richly featured, and easy to navigate, Open Cart is an open source e-commerce cart software. Designed with a visually dynamic interface, Open Cart is a wholesome online shopping cart solution. It makes the online store search engine friendly, where you can sell online your goods and services in a customer attractive way.
Open Cart makes the online shopping an engaging and interactive experience. The software is one of the most popular and most sought after shopping cart solution. The software installation converts the e-commerce website into a customer engaging platform and makes online shopping a memorable experience, thus increasing the profitability of site.
To help you learn about the significance of Open Cart Development, we have tabulated below the features of this software. Here it is:-
| Open Source | Documentation | Limitless Categories and Products |
| Automatic Image Magnifying | Multiple Tax Rates | Related Products and Information Pages |
| Shipping Weight Calculation | Unlimited Templates | Search Engine Optimization friendly |
| Multi Language and Multi Currency | Module Instance System | Unbiased Product Reviews |
| Backup and Restore Tools | Product and Site Ratings | Printable Invoices and Sales Reports |
| Downloadable Products | Error Logging | PCI Complaint |
Open Cart MVC Design Pattern
Basically Open Cart is designed as per MVC design pattern. MVC stands for Model View Controller. Following are the integral components of MVC:-
- M (Model)
Model usually consists of DB queries. It is a platform where direct interaction with database takes place. Here data is accessed from database and restructured into a format which can be easily processed by front-end. Open Cart provides access to mySQL queries; it does not use ORM but allows the developer to write database queries.
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- V (View)
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View presents the display side of MVC pattern. This platform stores simpler, modified templates. In case you wish to re-design the entire store, you will just need to simply and modify the View component. For re-designing and re-modification, the M, C and L do not need to be touched. You can locate the View files in Open Cart with their .tpl suffix.
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- C (Controller)
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Controller controls the entire data; it extracts the data from the model. It also pulls the configuration settings that are saved with modules and works through with the help of View files.
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- L (Language)
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Open Cart has the amazing feature of multi lingual. It extends MVC to MVCL. Thus, there is facility of separating any specific language information for the purpose of internalization. These language files can be stored for storing any text, for example, headings, title button text and many more. The main advantage of this is that you will require adjusting only one file per language to give translation of online store.
Open Cart Installation
You can download the latest version of Open Cart (v.1.5.5.1) from any recommended Open Cart website or directly from github. The download option allows you the access to the compressed archive of Open Cart in zip file, which stores the following files-
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- “upload” folder – It consists of the files which you need to upload Open Cart to a web server.
- “license.txt” file – It consists of license agreement which authorise the use of Open Cart on your website.
- “readme.txt” file – It gives you links to the install and upgrade instructions on the Open Cart website.
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After downloading the zip and extracting the above mentioned files to a specific location on your computer, you can further follow the instruction and easily process the Open Cart installation.