Freeway

The concept of ecommerce system or platform in terms of web applications may seem complex for beginners. Depending on the type of ecommerce application and its ease of use, you do not have to read certain books in order to make a simple virtual store and to understand the basic mechanisms that allow its customization.

Many of the actual ecommerce websites are made using specialized content management systems that have specific functionalities, necessary to deploy an online store. The scope of ready made websites is to simplify both novices and advanced webmasters work.

If you want to rapidly implement an ecommerce platform as a base for an online store, you can choose only a shopping cart that will be integrated into an actual website, alongside other necessary modules or a complete application that contains all features needed for a simple or a complex virtual store.

Freeway is an open source (free) user friendly ecommerce system, created with PHP and having a MySQL database as backend. The installation takes place in a few easy steps and the minimum system requirements are checked with an automatic tool, which will tell you if there are possible incompatibilities in your system configuration. After you finalize the installation, the install directory must be renamed or deleted and the configuration files permissions must be set to 644 value for security reasons.

From the administration backend you will be able to control all aspects of your website appearance and behavior in interaction with your users. For example, you can easily define new customers, events, products, services and subscriptions. The integrated content management system allows you to create news and FAQs sections, organize the homepage and to customize the articles listings settings.

You can also change the default template, shop settings and marketing features details. The advantage of using this ecommerce platform is represented by the presence of a default content as store example, which helps you to better understand the main functionalities of your store and the degree of correlation with certain directives changes in administration panel.

Even more, there is available for download an experimental load testing file containing a large number of products, events, services and subscriptions. This testing file is useful to detect the best server and application settings in order to obtain optimal results with your online store. If you want to test the Freeway application on your own web server, it can be downloaded from here.