Symphony.

I've searched through the forums and found a number of mentions to people who have/are using Symphony for Shopping Cart functionality and this one in particular suggests that there's a few people looking to solve the problem and keep things DRY.

This Shopping Cart extension seems to have sparked that discussion but I'm just wondering how people are generally approaching the problem when they have need for common shopping cart functionality? (By common I'm talking about a basket with usual functionality, optional discount codes, shipping, checkout, order processing & management—nothing out of the ordinary).

At present it sounds like people are having to repeat the same steps whenever this is required rather than starting from a shopping cart extension/ensemble?

Any tips, comments, suggestions welcome. At the moment I'm weighing up whether to use Symphony in this case or revert back to another CMS/ecommerce solution. I'm still fairly new to Symphony and I'm not sure I'd be able to put together any complex extensions or events to get things working given current familiarity and time/expense considerations so it's just to gauge where things are at with Symphony and how feasible it is for me.

It may be advisable to use a different CMS to be honest. Symphony is perfectly capable of providing this functionality but there aren't really any 'out of the box' solutions to ease the way, so it will likely involve a lot of custom coding.

I think a really carefully thought out ecommerce ensemble would be fantastic by the way - as although ecommerce is hard to boilerplate there are enough common functions to be able to create a solid starting point. However that'd be quite a commitment for whoever undertook it, both for the initial creation and the subsequent maintenance and updates - it'd practically be a CMS in its own right. But a combination of OpenCart's functionality and Symphony's elegance would be a dream.

From the linked thread it sounds like there are a few people on the case taking the Shopping Cart in different directions to try and come up with a community solution that will solve the problem. Symphony seems ideally suited to the task of ecommerce with orders, products, users, discounts, etc all being resources which just need to link in with each other with the processing glue in between. I agree, Symphony with cart functionality would be fantastic.

If anyone's got any ensembles providing standard cart functionality then it could be interesting to take a look.

I'll be working towards a solution throughout January but I can't give an ETA as I'm already behind on an extension for the same project.