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Joomla! CMS & Freeway eCommerce

There was a Joomla! CMS user group meeting in Brisbane yesterday (yes on April 1st but no joke), which featured Joomla!’s main man Andrew Eddie, another core developer Sam Moffatt. It was a good meeting (food & drink was provided, which always helps too). Installation of Joomla! is a breeze, and I’m told that it’s now powering 2% of sites around the world now.

A lot of skilled web developers use it, but that’s not the reason for the high uptake. It appears that “ordinary users” with little or no web experience are able to install and use Joomla! effectively to set up their little websites, and that is quite an accomplishment. In that context, it’s perhaps similar to PHP in the web scripting sphere, and MySQL in the database realm (although one might say that SQLite is even easier in specific contexts).

There was also a brief demo of Freeway, a GPL licensed eCommerce package that also supports services, events, subscriptions, and much more. It offers migration options to move from either osCommerce (which is what it’s derived from, years back) and XenCart. There’s also some neat integration between Joomla! and Freeway, which although only a few months old looks very good!
And I’ve heard that Freeway is actually working towards certifying for the new VISA security and auditing requirements; that’s just excellent, with so many web shops out there (and growing all the time), keeping it all safe is a concern that needs to be addressed. NetRegistry recently announced that it was adopting Freeway as its favourite eCommerce solution.

Freeway is sponsored by Zac-Ware, a Brisbane (Australia) based company led by Damian Hickey.
And did you know that Andrew Eddie is based in Toowoomba (few hours west of Brisbane).
Two interesting Queensland exports I’m keeping an eye on!

Posted on 2 Comments

2 thoughts on “Joomla! CMS & Freeway eCommerce

  1. Thanks for the article! I’ve been demoing/installing a lot of eCommerce CMSs lately and could not find one that I liked.

    I found that most of the established eCommerce CMSs (ZenCart, VirtueMart, osCommerce, etc) were developed in the pre-Web-2.0 era. This means that these CMSs have great store admin functionality. On the other hand, the code architecture is a bit old/clunky and not as modular as the newer eCommerce CMSs. This makes customizing and personalizing seem like a hack-job.

    In the other spectrum, I found that many newer eCommerce CMSs (OpenCart, UberCart, Magento, etc) are very Web 2.0 friendly and modular. This is great, but these solutions are not as mature. OpenCart/UberCart is not as feature-ful. Magento is crawling slow.

    My buddy Artem over at http://beerpla.net saw your post and recommended that I check out Freeway. After playing around with the demo, I like it a lot more than any of the other CMSs I’ve tried. I also did notice that it borrowed a lot of admin functionality from osCommerce (which I can’t complain about). I will definitely try to install this on my server to see how the code looks and how easy I can tailor it to my need. Hopefully my search for a good CMS for my upcoming eCommerce store will end here! Thanks again for the post!

  2. […] update slightly related to my previous post today. Yesterday I was organising something through a site in the US, which uses a rich Flash app […]

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