flexi cart - A comprehensive shopping cart library for CodeIgniter

[eluser]haseydesign[/eluser]
Hey all,

I would like to announce the release of 'flexi cart', a comprehensive shopping cart library for CodeIgniter.

Whilst CodeIgniter does indeed come with its own cart library, the library is quite basic in functionality and is only aimed at creating simple e-commerce stores.

The flexi cart library includes the following features:

<strong>Shipping</strong>
+ Base available shipping options and charges on a customers location.
+ Calculate shipping charges based on the weight and value of an order.
+ Include or exclude specific shipping options from discount offers.
+ Set shipping charges for specific items purchased from the store.
Example: Item A ships free of charge, Item B ships for $10 on top of the carts standard shipping charge.
+ Ban specific items from being shipped to specific locations.

<strong>Taxes</strong>
+ Base available tax rates on a customers 'billing to' or 'shipping to' location.
+ Define specific tax rates for specific items in the cart.
+ Customers can toggle whether to show cart prices include or excluding taxes.

<strong>Localisation</strong>
+ Setup locations like countries, states, cities, post/zip codes to even specific streets and door numbers.
+ Locations can be grouped into zones, where rules can then be applied to all locations within a zone, rather than setting the rule for each location.

<strong>Discounts and Reward Points/Vouchers</strong>
+ Setup complex rule conditions for specific items and groups of items that are added to the cart based on customer location, cart/item value, item quantities and whether other items are present within the cart.
+ Define how tax should be applied to specific discounts. E.g. Whether tax should be applied before or after the discount is applied.
+ Allow customers to earn reward points from purchasing items that they can then later exchange for a discount voucher.

<strong>Plus many more features...</strong>
+ Multiple currencies
+ Item stock control
+ Surcharges
+ Save/load incomplete carts for later shopping
+ Multilingual custom status and error messages
+ Currency and weight conversion tools

The purpose of the flexi cart library is to offer modularised shopping cart features, that allow a developer to pick and choose which features they require, without having to include features that are surplus to the clients requirements.

flexi cart is flexible enough to be used to create simple 10 item ecommerce stores, up to creating huge online stores rivaling the functionality of ecommerce giants like Magento, Opencart and X-cart. The tools are provided, you just have to put them together.

The library, documentation, and a comprehensive live online demo are available from the flexi cart site.
<strong>http://haseydesign.com/flexi-cart</strong>

The library has been a long time in the making and has been used for some of my own client sites.
I would now like to release the code to the public so that others can also make use of it.

Enjoy =)

P.s. If anyone does particularly like the style of this library, I have also built a user authentication system that was originally based on Ben Edmunds popular Ion Auth library.
The 'flexi auth' library is highly customisable like flexi cart including features like PHPASS password hashing, Google reCaptcha, user groups and privileges, plus much much more.

[eluser]InsiteFX[/eluser]
Doe's this have digital downloads?

[eluser]haseydesign[/eluser]
There are no particular examples I have created that would deal with digital downloads.
However, it could probably be adapted to deal with them.

What kinds of features and functionality would you see being required?

[eluser]InsiteFX[/eluser]
Digital Downloads

For downloading Software and PDF eBooks.

Download area would need to be protected.
This would be like changing the filename to a fake filename.

Log the users IP address.

Set max number of downloads.

[eluser]haseydesign[/eluser]
The features required to manage the digital downloads are a little too far out of the initial scope of the library.

If the library does get some interest and digital downloads become a common request, it's something i could look at adding at a later date.

[eluser]somenet[/eluser]
There is no user_guide in download file please provide the user_guide in download file.

[eluser]haseydesign[/eluser]
Hi somenet,
If you install the demo on your local environment, you can access the user guide via the demo site.

However I see how this could be a little annoying if you want to just browse the documentation.
I'll look into porting the existing demo user guide into some standalone html files.

[eluser]InsiteFX[/eluser]
Creating Documentation - Help Files

[eluser]somenet[/eluser]
Hi haseydesign
I can successfully configure the user_guide.Thanks for the code.

[eluser]Ryan Paddy[/eluser]
Couple of questions:

1) Does flexi cart have support for any payment mechanisms built in? CC gateway/PayPal?

2) I get the impression flexi cart doesn't have a "user" concept, just cart sessions. You mention that you have a separate authorisation library. Does your authorisation library integrate easily with flexi cart? I see that flexi cart's "order" table has a "user" field, which would be a start.