Well I finally brought our site public again - this is a 2.0.4 site - nothing too special yet as I am coding a few special things on the backend right now. I guess I am proud of it as it is an X 4.1.9 to cs 2.0.4 direct migration with almost 4 years of order history and affiliate commissions - no commission left behind!
On the backend I have done full integrations of the ordering system with our real-time webservice at our fulfillment warehouse that ties into GP accounting.
I have to say this piece of code is one of the best organized and simplest pieces of software to both skin and code inside of. No big surprises and about 1/5 the bloat to wade through.
This is my day job, by the way. Be nice! 
http://www.orthodoxmarketplace.com
I am currently bringing in a few old addons into the CS hemisphere and also working on allowing affiliate with certain codes to have entirely custom skins load [files and directories keyed by affiliate] that will give the illusion of our storefront being a part of their site.
Hopefully we’ll have a few interesting things to show in the near future.
Nice Job man.
Great conversion!
It’s way better software than X, trust me, I know. I was on X as user #300’ish. many moons ago!
Site looks good.
Very nice move to cs-cart, congratulations!
Honestly, the main reason we made the switch was that CS implemented many of the admin changes I had mapped out to do… so it saved us roughly 8 months of development time.
As it stands now, the workflow improvement has been extraordinary.
We went from running on a RHEL server built on rpms and frankly not well customized to a vanilla REHL box that I built from source a-z and our performance enhancements have already had an enormous impact:
- Customer service requests on the new server, running CS-Cart and CerberusWeb for support tickets - we are spending between 5-8 minutes LESS per ticket. No waiting on any task - the sites run at the speed of myself and my staff…
Needless to say, anyone who runs a real business can assess the ROI on that step up alone.
- Customers are reporting a friendlier and faster experience, and ALSO by removing the tedium of flipping between pages our carts have seen an average checkout gross increase of 70%. This has proven to us that when customers enjoy the shopping experience itself, they purchase more products.
- In terms of skinning and code customization, I have never worked with a simpler platform on both levels:
CSS files cascade logically and properly - all I have had to do is add my own personal style sheet to the end to make my customizations stick. This is going to be very handy for when I customize the template to respond to partner codes by swapping out design elements on the fly for extra-special affiliates (who will have header banners and coloring to match their home sites.
We have already done this to display a sifr banner when a customer uses a standard affiliate code (e.g [url]Orthodox Marketplace
The core/controllers/views model is incredibly easy to manipulate, and the core codebase for the cart is anything but bloated - lots of efficient reuse of functions, lots of consistent behavior. Sure when one thing breaks lots of things do, but the reverse is also true. Very little reinventing the wheel, and especially in the area of array consistency I found that tweaks made to arrays made at their creation survive all the way through the core code and addons to whatever customizations I had planned.
In fact, I spent ZERO time tracing back through functions trying to find out where array elements got ‘split’ off or truncated - this was something that I had consistent trouble with in X.
Likewise, adding UI elements on both the admin and the customer side were incredibly easy. I am still not entirely sure how to work with hooks to insert view content into existing stock views but hopefully that will be the next thing I figure out.
Looking good. The most noticeable aspect that jumped out at me right away was the small font used in the categories. I realize there are quite a bit of categories so it may need to remain small for room saving purposes.