OpenCart Community

I hope this is the right forum for this question.

I have been looking to start my site with opencart and was looking for some sites that I really liked and functioned well and this was one of them.

http://cravingforagame.ca/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

was this site made with opencart? If not was it another CMS? Is there any easy way to find out?

I like:
The functionality of the search box, Many sites I have searched have horrible search.
The artistic design and layout of the menus.
The clean look of all the images.
The search engine friendliness.

If this was not done with opencart, could something similar or better be done with opencart?

Thanks

no that site is not opencart. I'm not sure what cart it uses, but it's not opencart. You could do something like that with opencart, but it would obviously require some customization.

OpenCart has pretty bad search, but it has many other great things that make up for it.

If search is your top priority, OC may not be the best choice for you.

It looks zen based, but why not contact the store owner he may tell you what cart system he is using

sojournen wrote:I hope this is the right forum for this question.

I have been looking to start my site with opencart and was looking for some sites that I really liked and functioned well and this was one of them.

http://cravingforagame.ca/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

was this site made with opencart? If not was it another CMS? Is there any easy way to find out?

I like:
The functionality of the search box, Many sites I have searched have horrible search.
The artistic design and layout of the menus.
The clean look of all the images.
The search engine friendliness.

If this was not done with opencart, could something similar or better be done with opencart?

Thanks

linuxaisle wrote:OpenCart has pretty bad search, but it has many other great things that make up for it.

If search is your top priority, OC may not be the best choice for you.

eh? whats wrong with it. There are easy mods for splitting keywords but for the most part it works fine

Qphoria wrote:

linuxaisle wrote:OpenCart has pretty bad search, but it has many other great things that make up for it.

If search is your top priority, OC may not be the best choice for you.

eh? whats wrong with it. There are easy mods for splitting keywords but for the most part it works fine

Since you asked...

Here are things that I think could be improved:

1. No search in descriptions by default (big ouch, but probably easy to modify)
2. No search in model by default
3. Multiple keywords must be directly next to each other. (another big ouch) http://demo.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... =1&model=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
4. No plural recognition. http://demo.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... =1&model=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
5. No admin function to replace keywords/phrases or add keyword suggestions. (like replace multi-function with multifunction)
6. No ajax autocomplete.
7. No spell-check.
8. No search in category names. http://demo.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... =1&model=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
9. No search in product attributes. http://demo.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... =1&model=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
10. No suggestions on the results page when no results are found. (use less keywords, more general keywords.)
11. No visitor search tracking. (I think this is another big one)
12. No partial matches. http://demo.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... =1&model=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
13. No search of tags, but this shouldn't be needed if some of the above are implemented
14. No search of info pages.
15. No search by price.
16. No search by brand.

That's all I can think of right now.

It only returns products with the exact search string in the title. It "works fine" at only doing that.

I understand search isn't at the top of your priorities right now, many other areas of OpenCart are in need of more urgent development. I do intend to work on it myself at some point if no one beats me to it.

linuxaisle wrote:

Qphoria wrote:

linuxaisle wrote:OpenCart has pretty bad search, but it has many other great things that make up for it.

If search is your top priority, OC may not be the best choice for you.

eh? whats wrong with it. There are easy mods for splitting keywords but for the most part it works fine

Since you asked...

Here are things that I think could be improved:

1. No search in descriptions by default (big ouch, but probably easy to modify)
2. No search in model by default
3. Multiple keywords must be directly next to each other. (another big ouch) http://demo.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... =1&model=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
4. No plural recognition. http://demo.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... =1&model=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
5. No admin function to replace keywords/phrases or add keyword suggestions. (like replace multi-function with multifunction)
6. No ajax autocomplete.
7. No spell-check.
8. No search in category names. http://demo.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... =1&model=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
9. No search in product attributes. http://demo.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... =1&model=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
10. No suggestions on the results page when no results are found. (use less keywords, more general keywords.)
11. No visitor search tracking. (I think this is another big one)
12. No partial matches. http://demo.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... =1&model=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
13. No search of tags, but this shouldn't be needed if some of the above are implemented
14. No search of info pages.

That's all I can think of right now.

All it does by default is return products with the exact search string in the title.

I understand search isn't at the top of your priorities right now, many other areas of OpenCart are in need of more urgent development. I do intend to work myself at some point if no one beats me to it.

sounds like you just need to use google search for your site if you want all that. 80% of the stuff you mentioned there is not a cart available that does it.

1) don't think it should be default, but an admin choice might be nice.
2) see 1
3) yeah this one might need to be changed to be default.
4) don't know of any cart that does this or any search that is not funded by a multi-billion dollar company for that matter.
5) don't know of any carts that do this out of the box, though some do have extensions for it. probably would make a good extension for opencart, but I don't think that overhead should be installed by default.
6) ok would be nice, but then again most other carts this is and extension as well, and I'm pretty sure I saw an extension for this floating around.
7) see 4
if you need this it should be an extension would make search just about useless for most.
9) again could be an extension, but would add major overhead to the system that is just not needed.
10) Easy change in the language file if you would like it to say that instead of no products found.
11) again most carts don't have this by default but as an extension, and again I think it should stay that way in opencart because of overhead. on a busy site it can fill up a db very quickly. Of course at this point I'm not aware of an extension that does this.
12) this is basically 3 over again and looks like now you are wanting or instead of and. this could also be an admin choice it is on oscommerce.
13) tags are searched. Supposedly there is a bug (that's already fixed in the upcoming 1.4. with it, but I can't replicate it I always find a product when I search with a tag that it contains.
14) this shouldn't be too hard to add, but again get more than a few info pages and you are going to be killing the server trying to search through them.

If you did all the things you had listed and you had more than a handfull of products it would be practically useless as you would get a list of just about all the products on every search.

Xsecrets wrote:sounds like you just need to use google search for your site if you want all that. 80% of the stuff you mentioned there is not a cart available that does it.....

If you did all the things you had listed and you had more than a handfull of products it would be practically useless as you would get a list of just about all the products on every search.

You're right, many of those features are better off as add-ons, and it would be a very powerful search rivaling a search engine. Many of these could be options on the advanced search page!

You said many of the features would be too heavy, and I would probably agree on some of them, like auto-complete. In terms of search page speed, I don't think adding most of these features would be a huge issue, because who cares if the page takes 850msec as long as it provides good results? Only if you have enough traffic to have people searching several times per minute (during peak hours) would the server load be significant.

4. it could be as simple as dropping the last s and providing partial matches.
8. I don't mean return every product in the category, just a link to the category with its image as a search result.

well don't know what your specialty is, but if you want all that stuff you've not try to run a store with more than say 5k products on php mysql all those things will very quickly bring a server to it's knees and will get you kicked off a shared host in a heartbeat. And I don't want to see opencart get too heavy to run on a shared host. If I wanted a gargantuan store with outrageous resource requirements I would just run magento.

I tryed to ask the store owner but maybe I was too indirect. So you think its Zencart possibly..

I like open cart and would prefer to use it because of all the great support. I just want to be sure before I set out to make it. When you say

Xsecrets wrote:You could do something like that with opencart, but it would obviously require some customization.

what would be a few examples of the customization needed?

Thanks!

well obviously the theme as that site is quite different than the default opencart template. As you've seen in this thread depending on what you want you may need to tweak the search if that is very important to you as you mentioned. Looks like this site has some sort of event manager opencart doesn't have one of those on default install. That's just what jumps off the page at me, but I'm sure if you start digging deeper there might be some other small things here and there.

sojournen wrote:I tryed to ask the store owner but maybe I was too indirect. So you think its Zencart possibly..

I have a couple of sites that use Zencart and looking at this site, it does look like a zencart setup.

sojournen wrote:I hope this is the right forum for this question.

I have been looking to start my site with opencart and was looking for some sites that I really liked and functioned well and this was one of them.

http://cravingforagame.ca/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

was this site made with opencart? If not was it another CMS? Is there any easy way to find out?

Thanks

This site was made by

DreamZone Design + Communications
WEB / PRINT / IDENTITY 2155 - 8766 McKim Way
Richmond, B.C, V6X 4G4
Tel: 604.282.7125
info@dreamzonedesign.com

It seems they have their own shop version, most likely derived (and rebranded) from either OScommerce or Zen-Cart.