For those who are not familiar with OpenCart, it’s a free open-source shopping cart management system that I personally was not able to find featured on any so-called best eCommerce platform lists. Of course, I have my own opinion on that, and I leave it to everyone to judge for themselves why this is so.
The first encounter with OpenCart was unintentional
Although OpenCart isn’t my favorite eCommerce platform, there are many things I really like about it but I’ll leave that subject for another blog post.
My first encounter with OpenCart was unintentional. It happened that I installed and configured an OpenCart system for a client, who did trust me on that project, although I didn’t have any previous OpenCart experience. Then, the client required occasionally maintenance and content work from me, and here I am now, far from being an expert but I’ve things to say about it that I’d like to see changed, because I believe OpenCart has a bright future.
Product updates
Each time the user saves changes to a product he gets kicked out of the editing screen to the list of all products.
It’s fair to say that the way the user is allowed to make changes to a product is just fine. Product editing page has multiple tabs, each tab comes with fields and options. Users can navigate between different tabs and do changes, then, whenever ready, changes can be saved, and all changes will be applied.
However, why do I see been kicked out of the editing screen each time after I save changes as an issue? Well, simply because I like to save changes to my work each time after just a few changes to a product and continue working on it. This behavior of mine is probably the result of the fear of losing changes I’ve done already due to connection issues, page load failure, etc. It sounds weird but I can’t help myself, I have to click the save button each time after a few changes.
I’d like to see here two save buttons, one to save the current work without leaving editing view and another to save and exit from the editing view.
Product images
Adding multiple images to the product is a nightmare, especially if the user stores product images in an organized manner. Let’s say images are in the sub-folder of the sub-folder, i.e. images/products/product-name/product-model/main.jpg.
For each separate image user will have to navigate through multiple directories to the specific image to select it.
I’d like to see here a way to select multiple images in a specific directory.
Search
There are multiple issues with the search. I’m talking here about Image Manager, the search used when the user i.e. wants to find an image that should be added to the product gallery.
Search is case-sensitive, meaning, uppercase or lowercase characters play a role when you do the search. From my own experience, file names are most of the time written with lowercase characters. However, that one time you have a file with an uppercase character and you are not aware of the uppercase and lowercase rule, You’ll get fooled. Note: There is a way to change this search behavior by updating the database collation.
Search does work only within the current directory. This is where the actual search option loses its purpose. If the search does not include files in sub-directories, the user will have to try the search in the sub-directory where he believes the file is located.
The search must be exact, meaning, you can’t just search by entering any part of the file name. If the user searches for vacation and the actual file name is summer-vacation, he’ll never see that file displayed as a search result.
It is certainly useful but users can’t search for directories. This would save a lot of time when the user knows where to navigate, so, instead of browsing through the directories, the user could just search for the wanted directory.
So, that’s it, please feel free to use the comments section below to share your thoughts and experience with OpenCart.
