Advantages and disadvantages of the OpenCart.

I have been working with OpenCart for more than 2 years. I have a lot of experience working with this system and I will try to describe the advantages and disadvantages of it.

First, I want to tell how I started to work with OpenCart. It was more than 2 years ago. At this time I created all of my websites on Drupal and I needed to create a big shop but Drupal 7 had just released and didn't have a lot of modules, Drupal 6 was good for it but I didn't want to create a new shop on the old, obsolete system. Another reason was that Drupal is a very heavy system and I needed something lightweight. So I started to look for a new ecommerce system. After few days of reading blogs, forums, sites and reviews I stoped at the OpenCart. I have never regretted it.

Advantages of the OpenCart.

It is free.
It is open source.
It is actively developed.
It has a huge community
It has a lot of modules and themes (about 10 000) - free and commercial.
Cheap commercial modules not like in Magento or Bitrix.
It has a good shop functionality.
It is very fast. Shop with 20 or 30 thousand of products can work on the cheap shared hosting.
OOP.
MVC.
It has a very simple code. My first OpenCart module I've created after 3 day working with it. For example it took me about 3 months for create my first module on Drupal.

Disadvantages of the OpenCart.

One of the biggest disadvantages of the OpenCart is that it hasn't good hook system like in the Drupal or Event system like in the Symfony. Events has just appeared in OpenCart 2.0 and they are at the early stage of development. Without it you can do nothing programmatically from your module. You can't even add new menu item without editing the OpenCart core code. You can do it manually or use vQmod for it. vQmod is a very bad solution because it changes the core files using string functions and causes a lot of conflicts.
As OpenCart has very simple and easy code it attracts many beginner developers. These developers create OpenCart themes and extensions and sell it. You can purchase a new module and get very bad one with a terrible and not secure code inside.

But if OpenCart will get a good Event system it becomes practically ideal ecommerce platform.

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opencart