Original author(s) Type Shopping cart software | Operating system | |
Stable release 2.3.0.2 / August 1, 2016 (2016-08-01) Repository github.com/opencart/opencart License GNU General Public License | ||
OpenCart is an online store management system. It is PHP-based, using a MySQL database and HTML components. Support is provided for numerous languages and currencies, and it is freely available under the GNU General Public License.
Contents
History
OpenCart was originally developed in 1998 by Christopher G. Mann for Walnut Creek CDROM and later The FreeBSD Mall. The first public release was on the May 11, 1999. Developed in Perl, the project saw little activity, and progress stalled in 2000, with Mann posting a message on April 11 stating "other commitments are keeping me from OpenCart development".
The domain expired in February 2005 before being revived by Daniel Kerr, a UK-based developer, who used it as the basis for his own e-commerce software, written in PHP. The first stable release was version 1.1.1, released onto Google Code on 10 February 2009.
In September 2014, Kerr claimed that OpenCart was the number one e-commerce software supplier in China while in August 2015 it was recorded as responsible for 6.42% of the global e-commerce volumes recorded by builtwith.com, behind WooCommerce and Magento and ahead of OSCommerce, ZenCart and Shopify.
Version 2.0 of the software was released in October 2014, featuring an extensive revamp of the interface.
Version 2.2.0.0 of the software was released in March 2016, after months of testing and help from the OpenCart community.
Criticism
OpenCart was criticised in 2013 for its use of MyISAM tables, dated coding practices and a perceived lack of code quality, and Kerr himself faced criticism after an angry response to the article.
OpenCart has also faced criticism for its poor security practices, and Kerr's combative responses to security disclosures.
Publications
A number of OpenCart-related books have been released.