TomatoCart is a new player on the shopping cart market. It has its roots in osCommerce 3, the long awaited follow up from osCommerce 2 (which is still in development).

Compared to osCommerce 2 and derived version like cre loaded and oscmax, osCommerce 3 and so also TomatoCart are object orientated coded and design has been separated from code.

TomatoCart is an excellent option for small and medium sized e-commerce businesses, while a heavy weight like Magento would be an excellent option for large e-commerce companies that have a budget for implementing (developers, dedicated server) their e-commerce solution on this platform.

Main advantage of TomatoCart towards other open source e-commerce solutions like PrestaShop, OpenCart, Ubercart and Virtuemart is the store administration functionality. The store administration part of TomatoCart is a complete makeover, using rich internet applications and ajax.

Basic Authentication  was used to send user credentials through the header of HTTP request. That made it easy to use, but insecure. OAuth is now the preferred method of Twitter as a method of authentication. From August 2010 Basic Auth will be turned off from the API, causing that you current API (based on Basic Auth) will stop working soon (if you are not already receiving the Basic authentication is not supported error message).

So in order to keep publishing our Twitter messages on our website, we have to implement the OAuth method and we have to implement a form of caching to overcome that messages are not published due to the requests per hour limit.

After reading this simple turtorial and downloading the available examples, you will be able to publish your messages again within 15 minutes. The turtorial and example files are based on using a PHP environment.

Using UTF-8 or UTF-16 Unicode characters in a csv file can be a hassle when using Excel to manage these files in spreadsheets. When using a default language in ASCII format, there are not many problems with this, as long as the regional settings of your pc are set to that language. But in case you have to handle multiple languages, it could become a little exhausting, switching the default language of your pc before doing your spreadsheet job. A popular osCommerce contribution used for mass categories / products import and export, like Easy Populate, relies heavily on csv files. This article will assist you maintaining unicode characters in a csv formatted file. 

Magento is an Open Source ecommerce web application launched on March 31, 2008. It was created by Varien, building on components of the Zend Framework.

Compared to osCommerce and other open source e-commerce solutions, it is a complete set of tools to run an e-commerce site with almost all thinkable features. Unfortunately there is no slim basic version available, so even on a dedicated server this beauty with a package size of 45 MB and it's 229 databse tables will use a lot of server resources and can slow down your customers a bit.