OpenCart is a highly customizable open source ecommerce platform with no monthly fees. It has a robust administrator dashboard that gives you an at-a-glance view of important metrics like sales, customers, and more.

OpenCart also has multi-store support that lets you stay on top of different stores from a single interface. This functionality lets you set products for different stores, use specific themes for each online store, and localise your websites. Product options and attributes are also quite flexible with OpenCart, and the solution lets you add extra product variables.

And just like most ecommerce platforms, OpenCart is highly customizable and extendable. It has more 13,00 modules and themes that you can use to truly make your site your own.

Opencart Basic Code Structure

OpenCart structure is split into 2 separate applications. One is the catalog (store front) and admin (administration). Each application structure is based on the Model View Controller (MVC) paradigm and includes a shared library.

MVC is basically the splitting of the data, logic and UI into separate parts to make building applications more structured and easier to manage.

Model : The functions for data storing, editing and retrieval. This can be done via a database, file, remote storing etc..

View : In web based MVC the view is normally where the templates are stored.

Controller: The bit in the middle where logic is used to choose which models to load and push the data into the view / template.

File Structure

The front and the admin are split into two separate folders and the shared library folder.

admin  folder – Administration Area

catalog  folder – Store Front

system  folder– Shared System Files

 

Catalog Folder

In the two catalog folder you will find the controller, model, view and a language folder. This so each of component that makes up the OpenCart application can be easily managed.

controller/

language/

model/

view/

System Folder

config/

engine/

helper/

library/

storage/

 

Storage Folder

It’s very important that you move the storage directory outside of the web directory as the files stored here can contain information that can compromise the security of a users web site.

cache/

download/

logs/

modification/

session/

upload/

vendor/

 

Conclusion

I hope that this introduction give you a better understanding of Opencart and how it can help you build a great online shopping system that can be further extended and improved up to your needs using already mentioned modules, modifications, controlled customization of existing code etc.

Thanks for reading and happy coding.

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