Prestashop compared to Zen-Cart and osCommerce [closed] - comparison

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Closed 11 years ago.
I'm considering Prestashop for a new project. It seems to be younger than Zen-Cart and osCommerce. Since I just found it by Google, I'd like to gather comments and experience and comparison of Prestashop to established "brands" like Zen-Cart and osCommerce

I work daily with PrestaShop. I think that it's the perfect solution for an average project. If you need something extremely fancy (but also extremely difficult to configure/use) you should go for Magento. I'm a programmer and I've had difficulties setting it up like I wanted. The learning curve is too steep. Of course it brings other advantages, but the project has to be big enough to make up for the time lost in learning to use the the platform.
The thing I like the most about PrestaShop it's the ease of use (for both the developer and the shop admin). Its modular system completely demolishes osCommerce. Everytime I have to work on an osCommerce shop, I cringe. It's outdated and it's not a good option, by any means. If you need to change the layout of the store, you just drag modules around in the Back Office. There's no cutting and pasting code in PHP files. The same for installing new modules.
In my opinion, PrestaShop is mature enough at this point. There are hundreds of modules you can use to customize it to your liking (just do a google search or try their forum). The template system is also top-notch and easy to use. Take a look at what you can do: http://www.templatemonster.com/prestashop-themes.php
I also messed around with VirtueMart. It's not a bad solution if you want to integrate your shop with a CMS (Joomla). There's also TomatoCart, a new-comer (they still don't have documentation for developers) that's based on osCommerce 3 alpha, but from what I've seen it's a major improvement. The Back Office is amazing.
Summing it up, I think PrestaShop is excellent if you need something that's easy to use, easy to configure and flexible. Magento is better for LARGE projects because there's a lot of overhead. If you are planning on configuring more stores in the future, the time lost learning Magento might be acceptable.

We install and review all open source eCommerce solutions as a matter of course. So we have looked in depth at all the one mentioned here. I prefer osCommerce to Prestashop. Prestashop is too immature and simply does not have the in-built functionality or breadth of Add Ons. It is not a "lite" version of Magento by any means.
As to the other poster's comment about osCommerce and Magento. Magento is an out of the box solution which is very difficult to customize. You need to be a programmer to work with it and even then the learning curve is steep. And if you do customize, you then are buying out of their upgrade path. Which is why the average site does not customize and why so many Magento stores look so much alike.
Unlike Magento, osCommerce has and always will be intended as a core eCommerce solution on which you build you own unique eCommerce solution.
Two different approaches to building an eCommerce site. One is cookie cutter then other is fast track to custom solution.

As one that love working with Magento i just wanted to show you this article.
If i were in the works of setting up an site for online commerce, i wouldn't choose ZenCart or OSC. They are both old and doesnt update at all. But thats just an personal opinion. And i work a lot with these things.
My Prestashop knowledge is limited though, but if its anything like Magento i would recommend it. Cuz Magento is by far the leading commerce platform atm. Also just my 2 cents.
Magento vs Prestashop
More reading OSC vs ZenCart

PrestaShop is an impressive new entry to the field, with a very attractive user interface and impressive product option/variant capabilities (like Zen Cart attributes). One downside is that it's much harder to modify; there is nothing like the Zen Cart "templating " capability so you're always changing core files. This gets hard to manage with the frequent release schedule PrestaShop is using. But you should definitely install it and spend some time testing it and evaluating its suitability for your shop.

prestashop is much easier than zen cart, oscommerce and magento. the easiest thing to do is try to install them as they are all free.

#Arta incorrectly stated, with regard to ZenCart,
They are both old and doesn't update at all.
ZenCart IS maintained, IS updated frequently and DOES have a decent roadmap into the future along with a robust community.
Here is a recent (March 2011) update from the ZenCart Team:
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=175569
Personally, I have installed, configured and maintained no less than 3 ZenCart shops, having found ZenCart subsequent to using "Selena Sol's" and Gunther Birzniek's Perl-based eCommerce app creatively named, "WebStore" for several years.
I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when I found ZenCart because I am not a programmer - I'm just a plugger who pushes hard enough on something to make it work.
With ZenCart, the community help is excellent. The "Getting Started" documentation got me started and got my websites running.
I've looked at Magento (too da*n complicated) and just about every shopping cart that's out there.
Maybe I'm just getting old but things that are shiny and new still do not compare to my OLD ZenCart for the key features I need:
Secure.
Integrates with Authorize.net & Paypal, among others.
TRUE Quantity Pricing.
Price based on Options.
Categories.
Fine, granular control over Product page Title and Keywords.
Easy to update when updates are released because I don't muck with CORE files (and I've never had to).
Thriving, responsive community.
Open-source. TRULY open-source.
I do have one complaint, though. I WISH the folks at ZenCart would reorganize their add-ons page to make it easier for ppl to find an add-on and know when the add-on was last updated. But as you can see, this is not a complaint about the Shopping Cart software itself.
Hope this helps.

I agree with Val booth. Zen cart is the best and easiest. It has just about any option you can imagine, the templating is easy to install and adjust, and help comes very quick for questions posted in the forum.
My only beef with Zen cart is that the control panel the user logs into is a little complex for any changes if you are a computer newbie. This is only because setting are located in different places instead of one area only. There are many features in some cases located in multiple places. Say you want to add features to your homepage, you might have to go to one area to check a box to enable the features on the homepage, another area to defind the features, and another area to list the features. Meaning you have to bounce around. I have been using zen cart for several years and have it installed on many of my clients websites. The control panel always takes a little training for my clients. With that being said the reason for this is because this program has any feature imaginable. That means more complexity (Not it's not that difficult you just have to bounce around to make big changes).
As far as features this is the main reason why you should use Zen Cart. Let me give you a recent example. One of my clients charges tax for Ohio and California. Two different rates it wasn't a problem (just a little help from the forum and a couple of changes in the control panel). Next, they wanted free shipping to the USA only. Not a problem worldwide shipping for a charge (USPS) and free shipping within the USA. They also have lots of options for each product. No problem. I tell my customers: "With Zen Cart you can grow into your carts features years down the road." The structure is already there even if you don't think you need certain features now. Instead of having to install a different cart, we just enable a new module or feature. It's common for the needs of a business to change. As your website (business needs) change the zen cart features are already there waiting for you.
Don't overlook the fact that has been mentioned in these posts about zen cart updates. When you make changes to any core coding it goes in it's own folder named after your template. When you update the cart it does not mess up any of your past changes. This is very powerful because updates are common and easy and you don't need to re-modify your past changes! With other large programs this is not the case and puts a lot more work on you for each new update. Look in forums all over the web and you will see that Zen cart is the most flexible, the easiest to use, and has the most features.
No I have no affilaite with Zen cart at all, I am just a regular webmaster who installs shopping carts onto my clients websites and has been asking questions in their forums for years. I can tell you from my experience Zen Cart is the bomb!

I found prestashop more powerful but to customize it you must have knoeledge on CSS , smarty template and php. For me it is better than Zen and Os

Having used oscommerce, zen cart and more recently prestashop I would say prestashop is probably one of the easier solutions for building a relatively simple, attractive looking site. My main site is zen cart but I'm considering changing to prestashop. Unless you are an experienced designer / developer then I'd stay clear of oscommerce and go for zen cart or presta. Zen Cart is in a way a simpler version of oscommerce. Prestashop just looks more tidy and less like an "out of the box" solution to the untrained eye than os and zen. Some of the free templates are pretty tidy, and with the odd change to a few images it's relatively easy to customize the feel. Function is another story. As stated before there's limited documentation and community with presta - which i'm sure will grow steadily over the next year or so, which might make a beginer go with another solution.

Ive been using OSC these past few years and recently i started exploring Prestashop. I find presta harder to modify compared to OSC.
I think if you are more of a visual designer, it is easier to use OSC. But if u are more of a businessman, u should go for presta. The interface can be customizable but it'd take more time compared to OSC.

i have used Oscommerce and yesterday i have just installed prestashop....and i found presta a bit harder than osc because it is fully object oriented and uses smarty template.
i think it is harder to modify presta than osc.

Prestashop has been growing and improving extremely fast, both in number of users / forum members, and in development / features added.
A good resource to start with is the new book "[PrestaShop 1.3 Beginner's Guide]", it goes though all the important features in Prestashop and guide you towards getting your shop online and having your first sale in one week.
In addition to doing technical review for the book, I am also an English Moderator on the Prestashop forum, and I see people with no programming or website development background manage to install and customize their own shops, add themes, modules and modification with little or no help.
The [Prestashop forum] has been growing rapidly as well, it reached nearly 90,000 members, and is by far the best place to get help or questions answered, usually within a short period of time.
Make sure you search the forum first, because many questions have already been answered…

Speaking as a representative of the company:
For a small business or anyone without a massive dedicated server, PrestaShop is probably the best choice. Any of these options will have a steep learning curve, but I would have to say that PrestaShop is the easiest to get up and running compared to the rest.
Also, we've really made a commitment to customer service, and the forums have become a much better place to get answers since we opened an office in the United States.

The prestashop as good as it looks has still very little or no documentation and or ridicilously complex written smarty templ. stuff, driving us "open source" fanatics, like cattle into bottleneck traps forced to buy our way out.
Don't forget it's a company! they are even hiring at the moment. and we will be caught.
and imho, "open source" by a company?
reaping all the benefits of community development, organising predators and game refuge paths for a nice game hunting season.

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What framework would allow for the largest coverage of freelance developers in the media/digital marketing sector [closed]

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This question is not about which is the best, it is about which makes the most business sense to use as a company's platform of choice for ongoing freelance development.
I'm currently trying to decide what framework to move my company in regarding frameworks for web application work.
Options are
ASP.NET MVC
Django
CakePHP/Symfony etc..
Struts
Pearl on Rails
Please feel free to add more to the discussion.
I currently work in ASP.NET MVC in my Spare time, and find it incredibly enjoyable to work with. It is my first experince with an MVC framework for the web, so I can't talk on the others.
The reason for not pushing this at the company is that I feel that there are not many developers in the Media/Marketing world who would work with this, so it may be hard to extend the team, or at least cost more.
I would like to move into learning and pushing Django, partly to learn python, partly to feel a bit cooler (all my geeky friends use Java/Python/c++). Microsoft is the dark side to most company's I work with (Marketing/Media focused). But again I'm worried about developers in this sector.
PHP seems like the natural choice, but I'm scared by the sheer amount of possible frameworks, and also that the quality of developer may be lower. I know there are great php developers out there, but how many of them know multiple frameworks? Are they similar enough that anyone decent at php can pick them up?
Just put struts in the list as an option, but personally I live with a Java developer, and considering my experience with c#, I'm just not that interested in learning Java (selfish personal geeky reasons)
Final option was a joke
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2007/11/perl_on_rails.shtml
As you said for the media/digital marketing sector php is the way to go.
I love .Net (it would be my first choice if the target market wasn't a factor).
I would really look for good well rounded developers regardless of their tech or market as opposed to ones with "media/digital marketing sector" experience.
It is possible to find good/experienced/reliable developers with knowledge of multiple frameworks. If this is a requirement, it is of course possible to vet candidates accordingly.
Given that you're referring to freelance development, it would probably make sense to add the dimension of "where the developer is based" into your thinking, as dealing with someone who's a stone throw's away compared to dealing with someone abroad or another city may affect how you work together. This means that where you are based also affects your choice: if you're based in a small town, there will be less quality canditates close to you with suitable skill sets.
I'm currently learning Symfony for myself, and work as a freelance advisor/product developer for a site that's built with CakePHP. Although an experienced PHP developer should be able to make the leap from one of the above to the other quite quickly, there's a fair amount of framework-specific intricacies that can only really be learnt by coming across the problem and then searching for the solution, or by being guided by someone who already knows. Symfony is considered to have good documentation, but I feel that there's a quite a lot in it that's also not in the documentation and that can really only be learnt by doing it.
I also worked for a company quite recently who used Symfony, hired high-quality PHP developers only, and if I recall correctly, it was about a month or two for new guys to get familiar with the code and the workings of Symfony, and start becoming properly productive.
Hope that helps.
In my (heavily biased) opinion, Django is gaining some traction in this sector. Off the top of my head I can think of a number of high-profile news organizations that are making significant use of Django and I've seen reports of organizations utilizing Django for putting up special one-off sites quickly for unique coverage of special events or circumstances. I know firsthand that PBS and National Geographic also use Django extensively for their web properties and I understand Discovey Channel does as well. There is a nice testimonial about how Michael Moore's site was rebuilt quickly using Django: http://blog.concentricsky.com/2009/10/michaelmoore/. I'm not sure if MSNBC has begun utilizing Django internally, but they did acquire Everyblock.
A few others I'm aware of that use Django heavily:
Mahalo
NASA
University of Texas
I've also seen that Django is being used by startups outside the media sector so I wouldn't say it is specialized toward a particular business sector. There are a lot of organizations out there that have been sort of silently using Python internally over the years and so Django is quickly becoming a natural option for web-based services. Python actually has decent roots in the scientific communities, financial sector, and I've spoken with a number of people in the entertainment industry who use Python in their digital effects / post production pipelines.
Maybe not the most riveting content overall, but there is some good info in here: http://djangocon.blip.tv/file/3041158
Look at your clients. Frameworks are just tools, you will have to go with the tool that suits the particular job. This also means your choice to dive into a framework will choose your future clients.
Many SMB shops need PHP because that it is the easiest to host and is interoperable on many layers of "platform" (not just OS, but also supports all DBs etc.)
ASP.NET MVC: I heard a lot of awesomeness about it, I like C# as well. But I can't afford to go only with the options Microsoft provides (database for example) and Microsoft products only really support they own stuff.
Django: Expected to gain huge momentum, but I'll wait until the language itself (syntax) becomes stable.
CakePHP/Symfony: CakePHP is very easy to pick up and is a good choice if it fits all the requirements.
Struts: Quite heavy, I would learn Spring (MVC) instead.
Pearl on Rails: Haven't really used/seen it, so no idea.
You could also consider to learn a framework that is radically different from you current knowledge.
So I love Symfony. It does all I need for a Framework to work fast and clean.
The structure and the architecture is pre-defined so everybody knows where to put stuff, so you can easily work together with a whole bunch of developers.
I would never chose CakePHP over Symfony, because if you have to make changes to a model, you can never again generate code after the development has started.
CakePHP just overwrites everything.
I sure lost all my code a few times. Really annoying.
Symfony just extends the generated code and that is where you develop.
Here you find a good discussion about CodeIgniter (with which I develop at the moment, and it is no MVC and PHP4-based) and Symfony: codeigniter-vs-symfony
The learning curve is a bit steeper for Symfony, but it has enough complexity for all situations I ever encountered.
My next project will again base on Symfony 1.4. And if you can wait, there will soon be Symfony 2.0
ASP.NET MVC, but only if you can use both a frontend and a backend developer for each project. It'll probably be harder to find developers with both competences and you might have to push .net-developers a bit to get them to use MVC.

How's the latest Ruby on Rails code?

So I've been programming in PHP for the past 7 yrs. What I should be doing is learning OOP but all the talks about RoR and Django interest me even more. With that said, I started to follow RoR when it first came out. I knew of it through 37signals when I was first introduced to their products. At the time, I continued to use PHP, it was what I knew and I was able to produce code much faster than trying to learn a new language.
Fast forward to 2009 ... it was a few yrs ago when Twitter made headlines, when they implemented Scala due to RoR's inconsistency. My question, have things gotten better for RoR? I know I shouldn't go by one company's issue but of course the fanboys will probably jump all over this and bash or pump one language over another.
I would assume by now lots of bug fixes and enhancements have been made, but I would still like to hear what annoyances there are with RoR that still needs to be addressed.
TIA!
Twitter's problems were not with Ruby or with Rails, and they have explained this at length.
This is becoming one of those various urban legends that everyone "knows" to be true, but isn't. It's quite hard to google for the story here, probably because of all the "follow me on twitter" buttons. Fortunately, a Stack Overflow answer referenced a detailed discussion on this that included Twitter developers.
I will give one other urban legend example that is (via RSI) somewhat programming-related: the Dvorak keyboard. Everyone knows that QWERTY is designed to be inefficient, to slow down the operator, and that it is an example of market failure, right?
Another urban legend: Dvorak vs QWERTY
Turns out this legend is not just completely false, but it has been deliberately, deceitfully falsified. Yes, the US Navy did test the patented Dvorak keyboard in 1944. But according to this report on the Dvorak keyboard:
How can we take seriously a study
which so blatantly seems to be
stacking the deck in favor of Dvorak?
And, indeed, there appears to have
been good reason for that deck
stacking.
We discovered that the Navy's top
expert in the analysis of time and
motion studies during World War II was
none other than...drum roll
please...Lieut. Com. August Dvorak.
Earle Strong, a professor at
Pennsylvania State University and a
one-time chairman of the Office
Machine Section of the American
Standards Association, reports that
the 1944 Navy experiment was conducted
by Dvorak himself.
Later tests by other organizations showed no advantage for Dvorak. It is also worth noting that slowing down typists was not a goal even in the early days of the typewriter. Actually, typing speed contests were conducted regularly with great publicity and the fact that typists were fast on QWERTY was a factor in the adoption of QWERTY.
Dvorak and Twitter and RoR
The false version of this story has been repeated for literally 65 years now, partly because almost no one cares about original sources, they just repeat the version they heard. Another parallel with RoR and Twitter is the religious/political angle. People have language and framework loyalties, and they have economic system loyalties, and the enduring legends play into existing bias. The Twitter story connects with some people's emotional perspective on the expertise they do and do not yet have; the QWERTY story connects with some people's personal dislike of free market economics.
Twitter switched some parts of their architecture from Ruby to Scala because when they started they used the wrong tool for the job. They were using Ruby on Rails—which is highly optimised for building green field CRUD Web applications—to try to build a messaging system. AFAIK, they're still using Rails for the CRUD parts of Twitter e.g. creating a new user account, but have moved the messaging components to more suitable technologies.
Your best bet is going to be working through a little prototype app. Rails is pretty nice once you get the hang of it. Though that is a similar truth to many frameworks.
Take a little piece of your app that's either easy or hard in php, and try to write it in rails. It shouldn't take too long and should give you a good real world example.
Personally these prototypes are my favorite. Systems with no users are the easiest to write.
Well, it's not only twitter that is based on Ruby on Rails. There is a long list with successful new projects - http://storecrowd.com/blog/top-50-ruby-on-rails-websites/ .
May be the only annoyance referenced by lots of users is the performance. However Ruby 1.9 addresses that problem and is compatible with most of the libraries already. Furthermore performance problems are function of Developers' programming knowledge in most cases and rarely a function of programming language speed.
My advice is just to give it a try for a week or two :)
Are you planning on having a site as heavily trafficked as Twitter?
If not, why are you worrying about issues that only came up under massive load?

What is your favourite Rails admin tool and why?

What is your favorite Rails admin tool and why? By admin tool, I'm referring to those that let some users add records for all the tables, like the tool shipped with Django.
This question is subjective and I believe the matter is subjective, but I think it would still be nice to be able to read other people opinions and gather data on the strength of each tool. Feel free to also comment on why you are not using a particular tool.
Looking around I've seen these ones:
Streamlined
Typus
admin_data
active_scaffold
full list
I think it would be excellent if there was one answer for and one answer against each tool and we just add information to each of them, in a very encyclopedic way, but I'm not sure if that's doable. Of course, this question is a community wiki.
In my experience Streamlined, Active Scaffold etc. often ends up limiting you and slowing you down in the long run, although it can be very efficient in the short run.
By combining the Inherited Resources and Formtastic plugins you can produce controllers and forms for your models just as fast as with a full-stack admin tool plugin, and it will leave you with greater flexibility and extensibility.
The tradeoff, however, is that neither of these plugins will give you the fancy lists that the admin tools give you. So as you say, it is indeed a matter of taste.
I've been using admin data in my last few projects and find it far superior to ActiveScaffold. When I used AS, it was always trying to do too much and that led to some problems. Admin data is completely non-intrusive. When it can't handle something in your data, it just displays a message instead of breaking your app.
I've been using ActiveScaffold for awhile. I feel that I have pushed its limits fairly far and it reacts pretty well (i.e. it's pretty robust). I customize it considerably so that non-technical users can jump in and manage their own websites with it. Those who take the initiative to work with it seem to like it. I do find the default interface confusing at times but you could change that completely if you wanted. AS is very customizable. On the downside, I've definitely grappled with my fair share of AS bugs, but the project does improve and I'm satisfied with its results. I have never even heard of the other admin systems you posted, but Typus and admin_data look nice. My biggest concern would be how easy I can customize them for use by non-techs.
I myself have used active_scaffold quite a bit and like it for certain tasks but I believe its niche is for power users not for mortals per se.
Streamlined was an interesting option but is officially unmaintained now which sucks. It really was a beautiful product but it never really seemed to get a lot of attention from the community so maybe they gave up on maintaining it publicly.
I've also not used Typus and admin_data but I ran into some references to Typus last night so clearly some very smart people are looking at it very hard.
On a last note, I think this blog post really summarizes an opinion I've come to recently after working with a Drupal firm for a bit. I believe that the reason admin interfaces haven't received the same amount of love is that Rails is built primarily for applications rather than content, which means that the people looking at backends are typically not mortals or can stand to look at an ugly backend.

Which programming language is the best for my needs? [closed]

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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm interested in building a site that has several interactive features for the users, yet want the site to be relatively light and avoid using Java or Flash. The site will start small but will hopefully be scalable. I realize developers tend to prefer a specific language and/or CMS and am wondering if you think a particular language would be best for creating a site with these features:
Short user profiles, photo upload, automatically generated thumbnails, a simple rating system, photo galleries, a blog section, ability to serve ads, user verification, polls, forms to enter contests, a taggable, searchable how-to library, a video library (using videos hosted on other sites)
I'd recommend you checkout Drupal CMS. Drupal covers almost all of your needs by means of drupal modules and/or drupal core itself.
Using drupal is easy, you don't have to be a programmer. Eventually you can hire a drupal programmer to take care of certain things that may not come with drupal or may not have any modules available. The other plus of a drupal programmer is that they are already familiar with the technology and can help you much more faster.
I would go for a python or ruby web application framework, say Django or ruby on rails, if this is going to be a single developer project it would probably make sense to leave it open on what framework to use - familiarize yourself with the frameworks and interview a wide variety of candidates.
Hire the best applicant and go for the framework of his/her choice - if he's any good, he can definitely tell why his choice is better than the other ones, not just claim that "it is" (or worse, it is the only one I'm familiar with)
wikipedia list of the frameworks
The best setup would be COBOL, with a UNIVAC on the back-end for storage and a vintage Enigma machine in between.
Or, alternatively, find the person you want to hire and let them decide. From the tone of your question, it would appear that you don't trust your technical abilities. What makes you think that you're going to get good advice from a bunch of random people on the internet?
Find a good consultant that has done work similar to what you're trying to do and let them decide on the tools. In the long run that will be the cheapest because paying someone to learn a new set of tools will be much more expensive than any other costs that might be associated wit ha particular set of software.
Any language will do the trick (although Prolog could be too tricky). Use what you know best unless you want a tradeoff for self-education in which case use the language you want to learn next.
I would recommend using Django framework which is based on Python language.
It's a tradeoff. "First with the worst" is a time-honored recipe for success. That would be PHP, huge first-place presence, cheap hosting, lots of existing frameworks, lots and lots of bad code. More sophisticated, in second place, would be Python. Yet more sophisticated, in third place, is Ruby. I'm not exactly sure where perl ranks in web development.
Note that you will tend to attract a slightly different kind of partner/developer/employee with each choice.
If it were me, I would go with Ruby plus a framework, perhaps RoR, unless one of the PHP CMS packages was really close to what I needed.
So much for opinions, here is a language and platform agnostic thing to consider: with the recent availability of cheap VPS hosting, you really can have any kind of site you want, yet you don't need to run your own machine room. It makes Java and the other JVM languages more attractive, I think.
If you want cost effective solutions then I will suggest you to go with LAMP. You will get almost all your required features in free open source scripts. Again the development of LAMP is comparatively cheap then ASP.Net.
By LAMP I mean Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.
The hosting expenses of LAMP are also comparatively cheap.
There is no absolute answer; You will have as many answers than users.
Do not re-invent the wheel!
First of all you will need to define your wishes - almost done.
Then choose a product regarding to the price.
Finally, find a specific employee.
For your needs, you can look at:
joomla
sharepoint
eroom
openText
blog platform
framasoft, chapter CMS
Some thoughts:
I highly recommend against Drupal. My experience is that it is entirely too bloated to be considered less than obese (let alone light).
I've heard NOTHING good about wordpress.
Joomla has a good reputation, but it also has the reputation of having a higher learning curve (I've never spent real time with it). If you're hiring someone, however, this should be irrelevant.
Personally, my favorite systems in PHP are from EllisLab Inc. -- Expression Engine and Codeigniter. Both of these are very well written and generally lay a groundwork for reliable and maintainable code.
Ruby generally has the reputation of being simple enough to build in.
I would use caution with Python, because it is in the midst of a transition between incompatible versions and that could be hell.
I'd go for ASP.NET.. it's trivial to build the things you mention with WebForms, although I would go for MVC in a larger project.. just my 2 cents..
as far as hosting expences goes Windows and Linux is nowadays pretty much the same...

What Rails plugins would you like to see?

What behavior have you had to implement in your Rails applications that you feel could exist nicely as a plugin?
What plugin functionality have you searched for in the past but couldn't find?
What existing Rails plugins could be improved or extended, and how?
I'd like to see an engines plugin that dropped in an admin interface that provided a dashboard summary of all the models in the app, with configurable activity charts.
I once wrote a component for an application that did uploaded a zip of photos to an application so they didn't have to be done one by one, I think I may make that into a plugin when I have time, well a new version of it, the code's a little ugly.
Not easy to answer. Everyone is biased towards his own current projects. Additionally a lot of great plugins already exists.
Personally I would like to see some menu plugin for a typical data base application. E.g. where there are few user roles, and every user role has different rights. And a main menu with sub menu which depends on user's rights to actions.
A (CSS) menu is reimplemented in almost every data base application. It is rather given application specific thing and I don't know how hard it would be to implement some general solution or template.
A Credit Card Payment System
Right now, no one bothers implementing credit card payments until a site has become "production quality". Single-person projects or small startups don't bother making this at first b/c they would much rather spend their time prototyping new, hard, or interesting features.
This is bad in the long-run for everyone, including end-users, b/c the default is to offer (often innovative and really great) services for free, which means only already-funded teams or people with lots of extra time can even get to the point of making something.
If this existed, were packaged up neatly, and were as dead-simple as Rails scaffolding, small projects could default to whatever payment scheme that actually made sense -- like pay-per-use, donations, trial periods, first 5 free, etc. -- making it possible to fund the really great products out there, instead of forcing them to rely on outside funding or ads, which ruins the product.
In a real physical store, people expect to pay. If the person on the other side of the counter gives me something for free (w/o buying anything at all), I say "Are you serious??" and walk away bewildered. But online, I almost expect it. This is bad! Because now everyone expects it, and people trying to make great things can't focus on actually doing that b/c they are too busy trying to figure out how to make it great and free.
Oftentimes, there are free things out there online that I like so much that I would like to pay for, but there's simply no easy way to do it. And I'm not alone. I use tipjoy and have donated to things that have a PayPal donation setup like Auditorium, but I don't see these as adequate.
The best thing out there that I've seen is RailsKits. But as far as I understand, they aren't packaged properly so that I can add them to my site whenever I please like a plugin or gem.
I'd like to see some sort of in-built video playback/streaming. I need it for my current project.
I agree with Greg... there are lots of great plugins, and lots of great ideas for more.
I think there's always a need for more web APIs to be supported. As we go forward with API driven services and semantic web, there's tons of work to be done on that front.
http://www.programmableweb.com/ is a great starting point for thinking about what really useful APIs don't have a rails plugin or ruby gem yet.
Cheers!
Walt

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