New E-Commerce Site Development

[Stang02GT]

A previous freelance client of mine has passed along my information to a friend looking to have a E-Commerce site created for their business.

I haven't done much work developing these types of sites, and I think this would be a good opportunity to my freelance business.

I have a couple questions for anyone with any expertise/experice developing in this area..

1. I am thinking of developing this site in PHP. Anyone have any objections, thoughts, or other suggestions for the development platform for a site like this?
2. Does anyone have any recommendations for a hosting service?


I welcome any thoughts and suggestions anyone has. Thanks for your time!

[zorgi]

I am also looking into E-Commerce solutions and will have to face it within next couple of months. I have some experience with VirtueMart E-Commerce solution for Joomla. I been scratching my head loads lately trying to decide whether writing my own code would be better than using one of open source solutions out there. Most of the on line advice points in direction of using one of ready made open source solutions. The biggest name at the moment seams to be Magento. Its built on Zend Framework and some really big names are using it and most importantly job market is full of adds for Magento developers. However Magento would be new learning curve for and I am not 100% sure if I want to invest time and effort in that direction especially because I fancy a challenge of writing my own e-commerce solution.

[maketick]

If you are looking for open source technologies then you can use PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python, Perl. In that case, you can use MySQL, PostgreSQL database which are open source.

[daniel aristidou]

Try Drupal they have an excellent e-commerce distribution. UberCart. It is a website CMS based on PHP http://drupal.org and
http://drupal.org/project/uberdrupal
You will need to probably install an Apache stack server I personally would recommend acquia desktop found at https://www.acquia.com/downloads