About CF Shopkart

A brief history

When I started out as a web developer back in 1997, I soon realized that most of my clients didn't have a clue when it came to the internet. So if they were going to manage their own e-commerce website, they needed something THEY could understand.

As I looked around the internet I saw a few shopping cart applications that seemed okay, but they lacked something vital that my clients needed; a good control panel interface that would allow them to manage their own website without the need to spend hours of learning new things that most business owners don't have the time for. Many interfaces were ugly, complicate, and difficult. I didn't like anything I saw! And I know that if I didn't like it, my clients wouldn't like it either!

So by 1998 I had programmed the first version of CF Shopkart (very similar to CF Shopkart LITE in the downloads section). I went with Coldfusion over ASP because of it's ease of use and it's growing popularity. My first client was very pleased with the results, and so I spent the spare time I had over the following year adding features and creating CF Shopkart 2.0 (which is actually CF Shopkart LITE). In 1999-2000 I released version 3.0 (I don't have any copies of that version for download), and after a few updates I scrapped the entire thing and created version 4.0 in early 2001.

When I first started developing CF Shopkart, I wanted to design a shopping cart application that was easy to install, configure, customize, and still remain easy to use. This is an objective that I have maintained over the years. So I designed CF ShopKart with that in mind and made it so developers can access the code and make changes if necessary (this means that there is nothing encrypted. It's open source).

Jon Wallen
Creator of CF Shopkart

Coldfusion books

Ben Forta is one of the most popular people in the Coldfusion community, and I have a couple of his book lying around my house. I would recommend anything he has written. You can pickup some books at Amazon.com. Here are a few direct links: