Phpshop open source ecommerce solution reviewed

In this article I will attempt to install and use PHP shop ecommerce solution to see how well this solution works for the average tech.

Available at phpshop.com, they say

phpShop is a free PHP-based e-commerce application developed by Edikon. phpShop allows you to setup an online store and manage all aspects of your online business by using a web browser.

phpShop was designed as a tool to offer easy customization and a standardized platform for development of e-commerce applications. Its use of open source technologies allows for cross-platform deployment using any operating system that supports PHP. phpShop is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Well looks good to me. I started out by logging into the shell on my Linux box using my putty client.

I need to download the source file

OK great now we have all the source files in a folder under our home directory on the Linux box. What do we do now?? read the directions. Notice the README.txt file in the listing above. Almost every respectable open source software I have installed so far has on. Every Linux program you are going to install will have its own way of doing things. Usually there is some database setup you have to do such as create a new user using phpmyadmin and then you need to go in to the source and find the config file that will refer back to that setting and make it the same as what you installed.

Going into the Help file you find this warning about their software, also the demo is down. Hmm not a good sign but lets press on I would rather be the one to find out if this software is good before you even have to waste your time with it.

Next, we need to create a location under our /var/www/html folder. Now remember that this HTML root location could be in a different location on your machine. You probably already know where it is if your even attempting to install shopping carts so lets move on.

Now lets copy the source files to the new folder we created under the HTML root


cp -r ~/phpcart/phpshop/htdocs/* /var/www/html/phpshop/


This command basically says copy everything from the first location to the second. The ~ sign is a short cut that points back to your home directory. Just makes is shorter to type it.

Now we need to give some write permissions to the directories where images will be uploaded from the web browser.

cd /var/www/html/phpshop/images/shop/
chmod 755 ./product/ && chmod 755 ./vendor/


Now we need to create the DATABASE so that mysql will work with the shopping cart. we could go to phpadmin and do this but lets just do it from the command line to be cool.


mysqladmin -u jhansen -p create phpshop


Note that this would only work if I previously had set up mysql with adding my self as a user with root permissions

Next lets import the table structure from the supplied file in the source code.


cd ~/phpshop/db
mysql -u jhansen -p -h localhost phpshop

This basically takes the contents of phpshop.sql and inserts it into the input stream of mysql. It would be the same as typing in each command in the file one at a time but using the
cd ~/phpshop/etc/
mv ./config-dist.php ./config.php
nano ./phpshop.cfg


Note, I’m just following the directions on the phpshop.org web site here. I'm giddy with anticipation to see what this stuff looks like as the demo is down on their site. That’s all there is too it lets logon to the site to see what’s up with it.

..DOH not working error on line 78, well lets see what went wrong here. Error output says some file is not accessible. Ok the directions to install the shopping cart are not correct. It looks like you need to edit the index.html file and put the path to where you downloaded the file at. you then need to give the script access to read it which it will not have if its in your home directory. So changing the index.html file parameters has allowed me to get this working.

Now lets see if the functionality is any good...

(15 minutes later)

I have had some time to check out the store, all in all its very well laid out and very clean design. We have support for products, vendors, sales reports, you can specify multiple admins, multiple payment methods, different types of shoppers, order tracking, customer tracking, and shipping.

Not a lot of crazy features but would get your product out there if you needed to. Now are we ready for the big moment the ratings...

All ratings on a scale of 1 worst to 10 best
EASE of install - 5 (directions not very well documented)
EASE of use after install - 8 (not very hard to understand)
FUNCTIONALITY - 4 (only basic necessity included here)
STABILITY - 7 (Code is still in development, bugs exist)

Well there you go, I’ll be checking out other shopping carts so you can get an idea of which is the best to use.. Have fun with this one!

Jake