Is MODx & FoxyCart right for my eCommerce site?

Hello Everyone,

I’m integrating eCommerce into an existing website I’ve built. I’ve been looking at different shopping cart and storefront solutions and having a hard time finding one that is web standards compliant.

I need a shopping cart and a storefront CMS. Cheaper the better.

Shopify comes close to having most of the features I want but it’s kind of expensive.

I tried ProStores and thought it as the answer at first. It has some great features for managing an online store. I was really excited about it until I got into customizing their templates and discovered I have to learn SSML their proprietary markup language. I’m not into their table based templates either.

I discovered FoxyCart which I love. It’s very easy to implement into my existing site, seems easy to customize and looks really slick. Their Ajax driven 1 window checkout is beautiful. A bargain at only $15/month.

So now I need a content management system that will integrate with it and allow users to easily manage the online store. Key features are being able to add and edit items. It’s gotta be really easily to organize them into categories that are searchable by brand, price, color, etc...
There will probably be around 200 products on this site. I also need an easy way to implement customer reviews. I figure this can be done through a commenting feature of some sort.


FoxyCart recommends MODx as a CMS. I’m extremely interested, It looks awesome!However, I’m not quite sure if it’s the right solution for what I need.

Will MODx + FoxyCart be able to do what I need to do? As more of a front-end designer/developer with no PHP knowledge will I be able to use this easily? If not does anyone have any other ideas that may help me decide what to do?

Thanks in Advance!

Justin

Anyone?

Kinda leaning towards Joomla or even WordPress now...

Is there a complete tutorial on setting up MODx + FoxyCart anywhere?

MODx can certainly manage your products for you. Organising products by categories can easily be done using Template Variables (TVs). Searching those products can be done with tvExplorer. Customer reviews can be done with the Jot snippet.

I don’t have any experience of integrating FoxyCart with MODx as a store though, I’ve only integrated FoxyCart as a subscriptions system. Have you tried the docs on the FoxyCart wiki? They helped me with the subscription integration.

Quote from: bob1000 at Apr 16, 2009, 09:49 PM

MODx can certainly manage your products for you. Organising products by categories can easily be done using Template Variables (TVs). Searching those products can be done with tvExplorer. Customer reviews can be done with the Jot snippet.

I don’t have any experience of integrating FoxyCart with MODx as a store though, I’ve only integrated FoxyCart as a subscriptions system. Have you tried the docs on the FoxyCart wiki? They helped me with the subscription integration.

This tutorial has been removed as it never really was finished. We’re trying to get somebody to handle it, but if you’re interested in helping please let us know in our forums.

try KiweeCommerce e-commerce Module for MODx

I noticed it had been removed but there are still old revisions available on that page, it’s a starting point at least!

I’m setting up a Foxy+MODx based events and membership registration system for an organization right now. It’s a bit hairy, and I’m crash coursing rather headlong through the foxyback module to pull things together. It’s a lot of trial and error, or rather get an error and trial a bunch of things guesstimated from the error’s output.

I do think that once the "early adopter" hurdles are overcome the Foxy/MODx package is very tough to beat. That said, in answer to this portion of Justin’s question:
Quote from: justinlancaster at Apr 13, 2009, 07:38 PM

As more of a front-end designer/developer with no PHP knowledge will I be able to use this easily? If not does anyone have any other ideas that may help me decide what to do?

I think that the best bet may be ExpressionEngine and the commercial add-on for it that has a full integration of FoxyCart packaged up. The drawback to this is that they are commercial products (EE has a free core if it’s enough to meet your needs) so there is some upfront cost involved... which conflicts with "the cheaper the better". Still may be worth checking out.

Relevant link on the FC wiki: http://wiki.foxycart.com/integration:expressionengine:foxee

Thanks guys!

You’ll be happy to know I’m going to give MODx a shot.

I installed it on my server this morning and am looking forward to working with it. So far it looks like a really nice system. the UI is very slick and seems pretty intuitive, unlike a lot of these shopping cart I’ve been testing.

Question: I installed MODx into a sub-directory on my server to keep all the associated files separate from my current live website. If I develop my new MODx site will it be easy to transition it to the root directory on my server?

Is there’s a better way to do this? I’m not quite sure. It’s the first time I’ve developed a dynamic site like this.

It’s mainly just a matter of moving the files from your subdirectory folder to the root, and using the Tools -> Configuration to edit the paths. See the wiki for moving MODx installations; you won’t need to worry about any of the database stuff since that won’t change.

Keep an eye on your .htaccess file if you’ve used it for friendly URLs on the dev installation (the wiki article explains this), and also if you have an index.html file in your root be aware that your server is most likely configured to use it before it will use an index.php file for the site’s start page; you can just rename it to index.html.original or something if you don’t want to delete it.

It’s usually recommended to add the /install folder to the new location and run it in upgrade mode just to make sure all the cache files are refreshed and the file/folder permissions are correct in the new location.

Oh, and make sure you log out of the Manager before you make the move; an old logged-in Manager cookie can cause some odd results after the move.

Great, Thanks... I may have some more questions on this as i get deeper into this thing.

Appreciate the quick response!

I’m putting together some tuts right now explaining how to integrate Foxy Cart into MODx. Here’s the first of many:

http://my619.com/foxy-cart-modx-tutorial-1