Does anyone actually use interchange?

[jols]

Does anyone actually use interchange? Is it a good cart/ecommerce system? Does it use up a lot of bandwidth? Is it secure?

Fantastico ---> osCommerce seems to be a big pain lately with the need for register_globals and so forth, so I'm wondering about Interchange as a possible replacement.

Just wondering.

 

[SageBrian]

Does anyone actually use interchange? Is it a good cart/ecommerce system? Does it use up a lot of bandwidth? Is it secure?

Fantastico ---> osCommerce seems to be a big pain lately with the need for register_globals and so forth, so I'm wondering about Interchange as a possible replacement.

Just wondering.

I remember trying Interchange way way back. I wasn't crazy about it, and I'm also curious if anyone actually uses it.

osCommerce has annoyed me for a while also.
I just started using Zen Cart, which seems ok for now.

 

[nyjimbo]

Does anyone actually use interchange? Is it a good cart/ecommerce system? Does it use up a lot of bandwidth? Is it secure?

Fantastico ---> osCommerce seems to be a big pain lately with the need for register_globals and so forth, so I'm wondering about Interchange as a possible replacement.

Just wondering.

We used to do ALOT of work with the Interchange system (even back when it was Minivend). When RedHat got deeply involved with Interchange it looked like it was going to become the next big ecommerce package but it is just too difficult to work with and is still too poorly documented. After several years of slogging through its bizarre combination of perl script, weird custom variables and poorly tested functions we gave up and went to Zen Cart. Even RedHat abandoned it and killed off their big Ecommerce suite they created for Interchange.

Interchange just never got to the point where the average end-user could become comfortable with it. I can't tell you how many times we would code something complex in a shopping cart/ordering system only to find a function not fully working and we would have to do some kind of perl code fix or abandon the process and rewrite it.

Its good if you like C++, Perl and like learning about undocumented functions and syntax but its just too much work for me and the customers we had using it. Now only two of our clients use it for databases written a few years back. Personally I think it was the most configurable shopping cart out there, but it required so much troubleshooting and dealing with a horrible knowledge base at their website to get help for bugs and proper usage of functions and scripts.

 

[jols]

Wow. That explains it, sounds like a good one to avoid.

Thanks for taking the time to offer this response!

 

[DomineauX]

Personally I haven't ever seen a single user making use of Interchange out of about 30 different CPanel hosts I have dealt with in the past 7 years.

 

[nyjimbo]

Personally I haven't ever seen a single user making use of Interchange out of about 30 different CPanel hosts I have dealt with in the past 7 years.

Pretty much the same here, all of our Interchange/Minivend installs ran/run on our non-cpanel machines. We wont even offer it or offer help customers install it on there own.
It's really a hackers shopping cart but isnt worth the effort anymore since carts like Zen have pretty much all the features you need with 1/10th the work.

 

[billbeecham]

I use interchange all the time

I use it all the time, although I started way back when it was minivend.

I will agree that if you just want something really simple it can be a bit of a pain, but I have found it more than useful and much more robust than any of the other shopping cart systems out there.

I would say if you're not afraid to learn a little bit then it would be worth checking into. However, if you're in need of something really quick you would be better off to look elsewhere.

Now, if I could just figure out how to stop WHM/CPanel from updating my customized interchange files and perl modules I'd be all set. That's actually why I came here to the forums.

Bill Beecham

 

[jols]

Bill,

I had the same problem with an aspect of cPanel that pre-sets email quotas to 250mb. We wanted our new customers to see 25mb here which is a much more reasonable email quota size. So I found the cPanel files to change, but then cPanel would change these files back with every update. So here's what I did:

chattr +i /usr/local/cpanel/base/frontend/x3/mail/addpop.html
chattr +i /usr/local/cpanel/base/frontend/x3/mail/popsinclude.html


The chattr +i in effect locks these files from being changed, unless or until I take this attribute off, by using:

chattr -i /usr/local/cpanel/base/frontend/x3/mail/addpop.html
chattr -i /usr/local/cpanel/base/frontend/x3/mail/popsinclude.html

I am sure you could do the same with your Internchange files, as long as you know their locations, etc.

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Question for you about Interchange if you don't mind:

Have you experienced any load issues with this one?

also

Have you experienced any security issues?

Thanks much.