AbaneCart Philosophy & Concepts

AbanteCart is an ecommerce shopping cart application with unique core architecture, scalability and high performance in mind. Most of AbanteCart ecommerce application management can be performed in admin interface. No special programming or in depth technical knowledge required for that. AbanteCart is made to be functional, easy and fun to work with. Open marketplace with selection of extensions provides ability to set up your eCommerce even with very demanding industry features and standards.

Primary Focus

Our primary focus is on the platform flexibility, expandability and stability. No doubt, it worth while having pretty design and friendly UI, but we do not stop here. We work on building platform that can support many different interfaces and APIs in rapidly expanding ecommerce and technology arena. Our platform has become true multichannel solution.

UI

We have done lot's of research and analyses and put together user interface that is optimized for day to day ecommerce management and for customer's shopping experience. There are still many more features to explore and add in the future with storefornt or control panel extensions.

Updates and Upgrades

We work hard to make system stable, maintenance worry free, and easy for the update and upgrade. All the updates and upgrades are announced in the control panel and click away to be completed. NOTE: To make system upgrade robust, all core files in the cart needs to be unchanged and all extensions needs to be developed in accordance with the manuals we have. We are organized with the release process and maintain backwards comparability as much as possible. All upgrade effected areas will be announced and documented.

Extensions

AbanteCart core, flexible subsystems and extension API are designed around the concept to have large number of extensions added to the cart. All classes, modules and systems are designed with flexibility and expandability in mind. We believe that extensions need to be well organized and installed very seamlessly with simple click of the button. AbanteCart does offer very easy UI to do extension installation and configuration. We rely on the community and third party extension developers to add more features to the system.

Core engine and library classes

AbanteCart keeps core classes in engine and lib directories. By concept classes that are commonly used in the storefront or control panel init load will be in the engine and all other supporting classes are in the library directory. There are pairs of classes in the engine and library, where engine class provides base functionality and corresponding library class provides manage tools for the control panel. Example: core/engine/layout.php and core/lib/layout_manager.php

XML Data

In AbanteCart we use XML files to load initial data and configuration setting to the database. After settings are loaded, XML files are no longer used. Loaded settings are now available in the control panel to be managed. Good example for these are languages and extension XMLs. Once language XML loaded to the database, translations can be edited in Control Panel. XML might be needed only if reset of language is required.