Should Open Source mean a poor user experience
Yesterday I spent a frustrating hour trying to create a web shop for a
new client. I’ve not installed an open source php web store for a
couple of years and assumed that things would have moved on a bit
since my last Oscommerce install in 2005.
Having installed Oscommerce via cpanel I loaded up the site and got a
blank white page with the following error at the top:
Server Requirement Error: register_globals is disabled in your PHP configuration. This can be enabled in your php.ini configuration file or in the .htaccess file in your catalog directory.
No detailed instructions on how to fix it, no link to the support section of the site. Just an unfriendly error message. Obviously I know about php so
knew exactly what the message meant but how is a normal user supposed
to know how to turn register globals on using htaccess? Googling the
error message told me that the htaccess files in every directory
needed to be altered to make the software work. Having register
globals turned on is a security risk and it seems unbelievable that
open source software, which may well have security holes, still
requires this in 2007.
After the poor user experience of this first error message I decided
to try Zen Cart which is a derivative of Oscommerce and appears to be
regarded as a better solution.
Zen Cart installed OK but the admin section is unbelievably
complicated. I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to upload my
first product and even then got an error message about some undefined
variable in a php foreach loop on line 317. The standard template wasn’t the best either.
Zen Cart has a terrible url structure so the first mod was a search
engine friendly url plugin which provided another poor user
experience. I think I got this wrong somehow and caused the php error
message mentioned above. There are loads of files to be uploaded to
different places and the instructions are not very clear. How hard
would it be for the urls to be search engine friendly by default?
Wordpress
If you spend a few hours installing plugins and themes Wordpress is
great. However, out of the box it has awful themes, bad optimisation
and unfriendly urls. Imagine if the default Wordpress install had urls
that actually looked nice and every page had a unique title and meta
description. How amazing would it be to open up your blog for the
first time and see a really nice theme that you might actually use
rather than something that only millionaire owners of dating sites
dare to leave unmodified.
Wordpress already has the capabilities to do this and I really can’t
figure out why they don’t. Thousands of bloggers are left scratching
their heads trying to create better blogs without knowing which
plugins to install. If the Wordpress team just made the software work
as it should right out of the box the internet would be a much better
place.
Categories: Design
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I find Zen-cart to be the best free open source shopping cart. I like it. I use it on one of my sites. On the other I use Oscommerce - I wish I didn’t have to - but to change would be too much work.
bestoptimized July 30, 2007 8:43 pm | Reply
I feel ya. I’ve had the same problem trying to look at alternatives to Shopify for a store I help manage.
It’s really frustrating to see open source commerce stuck in 2002 when everything else has evolved.
markus941 July 30, 2007 9:05 pm | Reply
I was recently working on a store that needed to use a cms system. After much deliberation we went with oscommerce since it seemed to have a good seo mod and was a well known software. After installing it it took me weeks to install the seo mod properly and then everything went to shit after that because of the sheer number of bugs. Normally a little bug hunting doesn’t get me down, but with hundreds of functions pages it gets a bit old.
I ended up creating my own system which is lightning fast (due to two includes for most pages, and 3 for the shopping cart’s ajaxified magnificence). I’m just starting to work on the admin system but thats rather uncomplicated compared with the actual site architecture. It also happens to auto create pretty titles, urls, and meta descriptions automatically!
I guess most people working on these sites are always trying to fix random bugs that always crop up instead of helping to make their programs better for customers.
Oh and btw wordpress has great URLs, they just aren’t the default, maybe thats what you were talking about there. Wordpress’s titles really piss me off though, I’ve spent so many hours reworking functions pages to remove that little »!
John King July 31, 2007 3:10 am | Reply
I use and love osCommerce. I use fantastico to install it, though.
Adam Thompson August 1, 2007 3:03 am | Reply