| X-Cart is a powerful e-commerce shopping
cart platform written in PHP/MYSQL utilizing smarty templates, and contains numerous
built-in features. As open source software x-cart can be easily customized to do anything
you need by those knowledgeable in software development. X-Cart's robust features in
combination with its low price point, make x-cart a great solution for your e-commerce
needs.
Before you dive in and establish your x-cart store, we feel
it is important to make you aware of x-cart's limitations and inform you how these
limitations can be addressed by resources made available by the x-cart community.
Limitation Solution X-Cart can be server intensive and
doesn't run well on some hosts such as GoDaddy. Use an x-cart recommended host as listed
in our x-cart resources tutorial or run a dedicated server. X-Cart is based in Russia and
the language used in x-cart is not always user friendly.
The languages are stored in variables which can be modified
easily using the x-cart admin section. X-Cart may not work exactly the way you want it out
of the box. There are pre-built x-cart mods available to add additional functionality to
your x-cart as well as developers in the x-cart community available for custom
development. The smarty templates require some programming knowledge to be able to
properly implement a custom design and often to make necessary changes.
Our x-cart tutorials, the x-cart forum at
http://forum.x-cart.com, and other x-cart resources are valuable sources of information to
help you understand what is necessary to manage your x-cart. X-Cart frequently releases
upgrade patches. The upgrade process is not overly difficult once you are familiar with
the process, and there are also developers and development firms available to perform
upgrades for you. While x-cart is W3C compliant, it uses tables extensively and doesn't
have the cleanest HTML code. You can modify your x-cart template skin to be more
efficient, or install an x-cart template.
To summarize, x-cart is a great e-commerce solution which
benefits from a knowledgeable community, x-cart mods and x-cart resources, which address
limitations within the stock x-cart. While x-cart comes with a low price point, be sure to
leave some room in the budget for further development and x-cart mods to get the most out
of your x-cart. Also expect to do some hands-on work or pay somebody else to do so on your
behalf.
X-Cart Speed Tips
For all x-cart's strengths, speed is certainly not one of
them. There are however steps you can, and should, take to speed up your x-cart. Here is
the most complete listing of x-cart speed optimization tips available. Thanks to NuAlpha,
B00MER, Connor and Emerson for their contributions:
Administration Changes
The following changes can be made in your X-Cart admin
section:
- Ensure your images are in the file system, not in your
database.
- Disable extra functions and modules that you do not need.
- The Advanced Statistics module slows down x-cart by storing
statistical information in the database. We highly recommend you disable the advanced
statistics module and use a log file analyzer and/or a program such as Marketing Manager.
- Files/Setup
Move javascript to .js includes and css to .css includes so
that they can be better cached. Optimize your html code so that it is clean and efficient,
limit your use of tables, and optimize the size of your images and product thumbnails.
X-Cart provides an add-on called "Fancy Categories" - don't use it. If you use a
linux server, edit/create your .htaccess file to include the following:
php_flag zlib.output_compression On
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 2
Smarty provides a method to increase speed by caching the
templates so they do not need to be recompiled. This should NOT be used when you are
making changes to your site templates, as no template changes will be recognized while the
check is disabled. So if making changes, you will need to ensure this variable is set to
"true."
You can enable template caching by opening the file
"Smarty.class.php" in your smarty directory and editing this variable to
"false":
/**
* This tells Smarty whether to check for recompiling or not. Recompiling
* does not need to happen unless a template or config file is changed.
* Typically you enable this during development, and disable for
* production.
*
* @var boolean
*/
var $compile_check = true;
Database
It is very important to optimize all of your x-cart tables
in your database on a regular basis. There is a script posted on the x-cart forums which
will allow you to do this:
http://forum.x-cart.com/viewtopic.php?t=11585
Server Level
If you are on a dedicated server you will have access to do
the following, if not, you may need to speak to your web host.
Install Zend Optimizer and Ioncube.
Ensure your server has lots of RAM.
Have your MySQL settings optimized for your particular needs.
Use linux's "top" function to monitor your server load. If your server load is
above 1.00 and it cannot be lowered with optimization, it is too high and you may want to
look at a hosting/server upgrade.
Additionally
When programming your site, or hiring someone else to
program for you, make sure you/they know what you/they are doing! It is very dangerous for
a coder to know enough to modify code but not enough to modify it correctly.
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