OpenCart is an open source PHP based e-commerce platform for building an online store. It has many of the basic functions that other open source carts have, it’s search engine friendly, and it has a visually appealing backend interface. The community behind it is relatively small still so there are still only around 80 total extended contributions that you can add on too.

You can check out the demo and give it a test run yourself. You will notice that the backend has a really nice simple design and is very very easy to use. I did some research in their forums and looked through some of the site examples that were running OpenCart. I found 3 really good websites that give good examples of the abilities this cart system has.

1. Gorgeous George

2. Beautyspot

3. Lytmed.dk

After looking at these sites it made me even more interested in OpenCart and actually using it on my next shopping cart project. It’s something worth considering for sure! Check out OpenCart and let me know whaty YOU think!

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Habari calls itself the “Next Generation of Blogging”. Habari is an open source, community driven blog platform. What makes it different you ask? Good question. I went looking to find out myself. Here is what they say:

While there are a number of technical reasons that highlight the differences and advantages Habari has over other blogging packages, a major component of what makes Habari different is its community participation model. Users who demonstrate a level of quality contributions to the project are granted more privileges within the project.

I’m not exactly sure I know what that means. But anyhow it’s always interesting to take a good look at any new open source blog platform when they come out and see how they might turn out. What you don’t want is one project like Wordpress to dominate the entire blog platform industry. They need some competition to keep them going.

Here are the features that Habari has. I highlighted the ones that I found interesting to me:

• Modular, object-oriented core for easy extensibility
• Supports multiple database backends (MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL)
• Uses prepared statements throughout to protect against SQL injection attacks
• Media silos to directly access various ways of media storage, like Flickr, Viddler, or the server’s filesystem
• Atom Publishing Protocol support
• Multiple users (authors)
• Multiple sites on one installation
• Support for static content (”pages”)
• Plugins
• Tagging
• Importers for Serendipity and WordPress

The reason I highlighted the last one is because it makes it easy for me to test out this application. I can install it, and import a bunch of content that I have written in one of my Wordpress blogs to test and see how everything works.

Keep an eye out for this blog platform project. It does have potential to be something great. Hopefully enough people contribute and get involved to give it a run at Wordpress.

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Simple Customer is an open source, lightweight, easy to use and easy to modify contact manager built in PHP and MySQL. The idea of it as it appears to me is to be  a very simple solution for managing contacts, customers, clients or whatever you want to call them.  Due to the lightweight nature of this application, it’s very responsive online and makes it worth using because of how quickly you can add, edit, delete, and add notes to each one of your contacts. Here is a screenshot of this free open source application:

Why Would I Use This?

For many people, a full featured CRM like Sugar or Vtiger is completely unnecessary. Many of us, me included need nothing more than to keep the basic contact information for my customers and notes on that customer. That’s it. Anything more is just way too much than I am willing to work with. I have been looking for a long time a contact manager that is Open Source that is quick and easy to use,, and that doesn’t take so long to use each time a page loads. So if you are looking for a small, simple, open source contact manager built in PHP, and something that you may want to edit for yourself than check out the Simple Customer project.

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So I guess ActiveCollab, the PHP project management software is no longer open source and is now a commercial piece of software. Interesting. I went to their website today to try and do a new download only to find out that I had to pay for ActiveCollab or I could do some sort of overhyped demo. Oh ok, I get it. You create an open source project and let hundreds of people contribute to it until they actually give you a product. Then you turn your back on all those people and make your software commercial. The software that really isn’t yours.

It’s unfortunate that their are groups out their like ActiveCollab that want to suck the resources of good open source followers for their own benefit and not contribute back to the community. Ridiculous. ActiveCollab, good luck with your commercial project management software. You are now joining a field where you are a dime a dozen. You will not succeed like you could have had you stayed open source. Chow.

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I have come across yet another cool open source content management system. This one is called MODx and can be found by going to www.modx.com. This system is different from other CMS systems like Wordpress and Drupal in that it claims to have been created with the other CMS systems mistakes “in mind”. It claims to be an Ajax CMS so it appears to be using quite a bit of Ajax in it’s system. Probably in the back office. Here are some it’s claimed features:

• Strong Web Standards Support
• Web 2.0 Features
• PHP Application Framework
• Works in your favorite browser
• Graphical Installer
• Improved Rich Text Editors
• Better handling of aliases and menu indexes
• Robust CSS Menu Builder
• Improved Meta-tag and keywords controls
• Separate Manager and Web User sessions
• Improved Document Parser and Error handling
• Custom Content Types
• Bug fixes and usability tweaks

Sounds like similar features to what everyone else offers. But if you go to their site they seem to have a pretty good setup. I have not yet used or installed their software but i’m interested to hear feedback from anyone who has. I’m going to try and spend some time this next week trying out their software and will let you know of my feedback. Check them out and give them a try.

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Your website or application may be in need of an open source FAQ (frequently asked questions) system due to your need of having lots of online documentation or the need to provide answers to your customers online rather than over the phone. If you are looking for a solution in that regards check out phpMyFAQ and see what it has to offer. I think you will like this open source application. Here are some of the features they state on their features page.

• Content Management System
• Community Modules
• FAQ Statistics
• Templating System
• Powerful Search
• Easy to use HTML editor
• Search Engine Friendly
• Simple and Easy Installation
• Advanced Spam Protection

And much much more. I personally recently used phpMyFAQ for a mass emailing tool that a client asked me to put together. It was a quick and effective solution. Check this open source product out if your interested in this sort of tool.

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