We are working on a version of phpShop that uses the CakePHP framework as its foundation.  I wanted to point out the main reasons why we made this decision so that the original inspiration behind the move is documented somewhere.  I list them here in no particular order:

1. CakePHP is easy to learn.  If you spend a few minutes looking at the tutorials, you will get it.  This assumes you know PHP and the basic principals behind MVC development.
2. CakePHP saves you time.  One can quickly ‘bake’ the model, controller, and view of any database table structure.
3. CakePHP is compatible with PHP4 and PHP5.  Kind of a little swipe at Zend here, but I don’t want to worry about PHP version compatibility issues.

Be sure to visit the CakePHP web site to learn more about why CakePHP is such a good PHP framework.  

The upcoming version of phpShop (affectionately known as 2.0) is extremely different from the current phpShop branch in more ways than the development framework we chose to use.  The database schema is completely new and we have embarked on a different in approach regarding how to define our overall store and site structure.  What is left is a new code base that should be easier to understand and, more importantly, easier to extend.  Brave souls wishing to have a sneak peak at the new code base can follow the instructions on how to install from SVN.

We have re-enabled the community forums for registration and posting.  We have a new server at Edikon that will serve up the forums for us reliably so we decided to turn them back on.  This update is also accompanied by an upgraded version of punBB.  Enjoy and see you there!

Hi everyone!  The community forums are online.  You can now access all the valuable information that is available in the forums.  Please keep in mind that the forums are read-only as we now prefer to use Google Groups to perform all discussions surrounding phpShop.

To be honest, I am still on the fence on whether to use forums or not.  Using a mailing list ensures that the load on the server is not too high compared to using forums.  This is the main reason we wanted to move to mailing lists.  But I also recognize that the forums already exist and the wealth of information available in them makes it odd to change and now have to access two different places for information.

The thought is that if all goes well, we will have important information available in the project wiki instead of being contained in forum or mailing list threads.

Anyone want to help writing documentation?  Chime in.

We are back!  We have been offline for quite some time due to a server failure we had back in August.  While we have had backups to recover from, time was the limiting factor: not enough of it to go around so that we could focus on getting things back up and running.  But now we have found time and are delighted to publish the site once again.  

This time around we have made some changes that we hope will make it easier for us to keep things up to date.  For example, we are running the primary web site using the Wordpress blogging platform. This allows us to quickly and easily keep the site updated at all times.

We have also decided to use Google Code for hosting the development project at http://code.google.com/p/phpshop.  It is very simplistic and easy to use.  It also accomplishes what we need by offering a simple way to collaborate on the code.  

Finally, we are recovering the old forum threads and hope to have these published soon.  We are trying to figure out whether or not to use the forums or to move over to Google Groups instead.  If anyone has any comments please share them.

Thank you for visiting and we hope to keep seeing our little shopping cart grow!