As promised, this blog now reflects current activities and developments in the saga of getting Fundisi.com on the road to a successful e-commerce site.

As of yesterday, Version-1 of the site is now history. (For interest’s sake you can still see what it looks like - but this will be temporary and will be replaced by something much better as soon as possible.)

Uppermost on my mind during the previous 24 hours has been what system to use for the new site. Do I begin DHTML/PHP/MYSQL programming from scratch; building the site pages; the secure shopping cart pages; and all the admin pages and consoles? Or do I piggy-back on an existing modifiable system as we did with Zen-cart?

Doing everything from scratch has the huge advantage that the programming is unique to the needs of Fundisi, while everything that we require can be realized exactly how we want it.

While there is much to be said for not “re-inventing the wheel”, we came up against some really awkward problems using Zen-Cart. Because we battled to get around the fact that it was not easy to create our unique “look and feel”, and to place the graphic elements and input forms exactly where we wanted to, we had to make many compromises. It made matters even more complicated when we attempted to implement the two-shopping cart system. (Click here for an explanation of our ill-fated two-shopping-cart system). I use the word “ill-fated” because, as of yesterday, the idea of the two-shopping cart system (as well as the site itself) has also been scrapped forever because it’s too complicated. The guinea pig site testers could not seem to come to terms with the idea.

On the other hand, yesterday I received lots of feedback from the Business Warriors Forum. (See my earlier blog post about this group). All the gurus giving advice emphasized the difficulty and time commitment involved in “programming from scratch”. They all suggested using Joomla, Drupal and other platforms as a basis. Having had exposure to Zen-cart, I was dubious.

Then, another possibility was mooted: Create the whole site using Wordpress as a basis.

More about this alternative tomorrow.

BTW, if you have anything that could assist my thinking and decision-making processes, please do not hesitate to comment on one of these posts.