Ecommerce applications are the best developers resources for setting up any kind of online shopping website to sell products & services. Open Source shopping carts are one of the best choices for the coders who want to get something to work with ease & less of efforts.

These are some of the best open-source e-commerce commonly used.

osCommerce -  It’s one of the oldest shopping cart .apps to be used. Completely multilingual, compatible with PHP 4 versions. It is SEO friendly & supports almost all payment methods.

Magento – This is very popular nowadays. Multilingual, supports local languages, multiple currencies. SEO friendly, has lot of marketing & promotional tools & can supports lot of payment gateways.

Zencart – It can be very easily installed & customized. Though it does not support many payment options as osCommerce, but serves quite well for physical product sites & file download sites.

PrestaShop – Very sleek interface & creating special deals as gift coupons, discounts, tag products, selling virtual goods and service is a breeze.

VirtueMart – This is a system for Mambo and Joomla. It hardly takes any time to integrate with Joomla. It has lot of features for people in terms of stock market to instant currency conversion.

More resources on Open-Source E-commerce Platforms

Open-source Ecommerce Platforms reviews

22 E-commerce Platforms

Joomla has thousands of plugins, extentions,modules which helps to run a Joomla website easily. To optimize SEO for website in Joomla these are the best 5 plugins one can use:

# Joomap – One of the first and most important things you can do when building your site is to make sure to create a sitemap and submit it to all the major search engines. The extension shows all the menu structure, content categories and sections and can also create a Google Sitemap list.

# Joomla SEO/SEF Component - The Joomla SEO/SEF Component mainly makes your urls more search engine friendly. Instead of your urls being a mixture of numbers and letters, it allows for more understandable urls.

# SEOSimple - SEOSimple is one of the most used SEO extensions by Joomla users. On the front page, you can choose whether to use automated meta data based on what displays on the page or manually insert meta data. Other features include the ability to customize the meta data for each page.

# J!Redirect301 - This extension works just as it sounds. The plugin redirects your domains to one domain so that only one version of your site is indexed.

# JoomSEO - JoomSEO has a ton of different features, but most notably, it dynamically makes the content more search engine friendly.

Microsoft Powerpoint is the most  popular software in creating slideshows for business presentations. As most presentations have lot of data to show & produce, charts are quite often used in these slides. The common way to make Powerpoint Charts is Microsoft Graph. You cancreate several types of charts, including line, column, area and pie charts. It is quite easy to make charts in this. You can check out a nice tutorial on adding a Chart to PowerPoint.

But as more websites like www.slideshare.net is emerging the trend of making & uploading corporate presentations is growing. Though Microsoft Graph is a good option but lacks a bit in looks & animations. FusionCharts is launching a Powerpoint Charting add-on called oomfo, the product is still in beta but you can register for a sneak peek  here. The best part of it is the interactive charts & great 3d animations. You can also watch a product screenshots video to see it in action.

Facebook is one of the most successful social networking site after Myspace. The receipe f or it’s success is some nice concepts which sets it apart from other social networking site. But well that is for another post to discuss on.

So if you are a wordpress blogger you can’t igmore the power of Facebook to promote your blog, these are some of the best worpress plugins for to integrate facebook in wordpress blog.

# Facebook Connect : This plug-in makes it easy to bring Facebook to your blog. This plug-in is used in TechCrunch btw.

# Add to FaceBook : This plugin adds a footer link to add the current post or page to a Facebook Mini-Feed. While the plugin is activated a link will appear after the content of the post with the text “Share on Facebook” or the Facebook icon or both.

# Facebook Photos :  Show your Facebook photos right on your blog easily.

# Facebook Dashboard Widget : This plugin will process your Friends status updates RSS feed, your posted items feeds and/or your Facebook notifications feed, and add a widget for each to your WordPress admin dashboard.

# Facebook Posted Items : Facebook Posted Items plugin allows you to display posted items from Facebook on your blogs. The fetched post items are in unordered list and you can style them easily.

# Wordbook : Wordbook allows wordpress users to publish blog updates to their Facebook’s profile mini-feed. To use this plugin, you need to link your Wordpress blog with your Facebook account.

# Gigya Socialize : It allows you to authenticate users through Facebook Connect, MySpaceID, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and AOL.  Also, you can update your social networking sites within your blog and invite your friends to visit your blog through this plugin.

# QuailPress : QuailPress allow you to add a button so that your readers can easily share your stories on their Facebook account.

# Friend Bookmarklet : Detects hCards, Facebook links, and Wink.com search results and allows the user to add the detected people to their WordPress links system.

# StatusPress : This plugin takes your Facebook status updates and places them in your WordPress blog.

# WassUp : This WordPress plugin for Facebook helps you to track your visitors in real time.

# Socialize Me!: Adds your blog posts to Facebook and other social networking sites.

Wordpress is known to be the most popular blogging platforms, but it has moved far beyond to  be JUST a blogging platform to a fully customizable CMS solution. One can tweak wordpress to turn it into a fully functional website, a social networking site & even a shopping cart site.  There are quite a number of eCommerce plug-ins for WordPress, the most popular one is wp e-commerce plugin which you can get for free. Many of the themes use this as the base plugin for the shopping cart  functionality.

These are the best Shopping Cart Templates For Wordpress :

Crafty  Cart - It’s a fresh flavoured retro style for selling t-shirts and handmade items, designed to be a starting point for any online shop. This is one of the best-  looks great, quite stable, & of course free.  It uses WP e-Commerce plugin for WordPress for functions.

Crafty Cart – Download it HERE

Vanilla Cart – This is also a good free clean & elegant theme for shopping cart sites. Similar to Crafty Cart it also uses WP e-Commerce plugin.

Vanilla Cart – Download it HERE

Shopper Press - It’s a fully featured shopping cart plugin for wordpress with it’s own set of templetes. It has free as well as paid templetes.

ShopperPress  – Download it HERE

eGoods – This is also a nice option for setting shopping website, made by designers based in Germany.

eShop – Download it HERE

Wordpress has a long list of plugins os displaying Most commented posts in wordpress is very easy to do with a pluin called Most Commented which displays a list of most commented posts in your sidebar.

First You need to download and activate the plugin. Then you need to place the following code in your sidebar.php or any other theme file.

<?php mdv_most_commented(); ?>

To customize the list, you can use parameters like:

<?php mdv_most_commented(10, ”, ‘<br />’, true, 30, true) ?>

Parameters You can use:
$no_posts – sets the number of posts to display
$before – text to be displayed before the link to the post
$after – text to be displayed after the link to the post
$show_pass_post – whether or not to display password protected posts
$duration – displays comments for recent number of days
$echo – whether or not to echo the output or return an array of values

That’s it, now you can use most commented posts in sidebar.

DeskAway is a cloud collaboration software to track & manage a project between team members, locally or anywere globally. Though there are many collaboration service similar to that of Basecamp & Zoho Projects but it targets small teams & business so pricing is also less.

Included in the extensive list of DeskAway services are project listings, project history, time sheets, a docs wiki, task lists, recurring tasks, discussion forum, calendar, blog, status updates and templates. DeskAway even offers a free account that lets users manage 3 projects with 5 users; the most expensive package is only $99 a month.. It is easy to use interface with some powerful back end functions.You can read details on how it works here.

As discussed in the previous post on ” Backing Up Wordpress Using phpMyAdmin” in this post I am going to discuss how to import restore the same wordpress database in phpMyAdmin, it’s infact more easy than exporting the database.

# Open phpMyAdmin from your web hosting control panel.
# Select your database using the drop down menu in the top left of the screen.

# Click on the “Import” tab in the top navigation menu.
# Now click on the “Browse” button to search for your database backup file on your computer.
# Ensure that the “SQL” option is selected then click the “GO” button.

That’s it & it’s done!

Wordpress backup can be easily taken by using Import/Export feature in wordpress admin panel easily. But it does not save your blogroll. It also does not save your settings or data some of your wordpress plugins might have stored(such as certain spam plugins). In this case we can use backup database using PhpMyAdmin.

# Click on the database which you want to backup.

As more and more freelancing and web based work is getting popular, so is the need to deliver the best to the client is also getting important. Freelancers need to use a proper invoicing system to track and record invoices & to show professionalism to clients. These are some of the best online invoicing applications one can use :

# Blinksale –  You can send 3-1,500 invoices monthly depending on the plan. The number of clients is always unlimited.  Prices are Free to $49 per month.

# EasyBill-  You can customize your invoices and estimates.The service creates PDFs for printing and record-keeping.It includes auto billing options. Cost: $9 to 29 per month.

# FreshBooks - Unlimited people can track time and send you an invoice, on any plan. Time tracking is available on all plans.There are limits on how many clients you can manage and how many co-workers can access your account. Cost: Free to $149 per month.

# Zoho Invoice- You can send 5 to 1,500 invoices per month.You can have unlimited customers. It includes invoice and payment tracking and recurring invoices. It also integrates with Zoho Projects. Cost: Free to $35 per month

# Invoice Place -  It allows an unlimited number of customer records, but has limits on amount of invoices/quotes per month.Cost: Free to $20 per month.

# Invotrak – There are many invoice templates to choose from. Clients can log in and see their account. Paid account does not limit number of clients or employees.There are limits based on number of invoices.

# Simply Invoices - Provides unlimited invoices with all plans. There is a limit on the number of templates. Invoices are generated as PDFs.

# Winkbill -  You can create sub-accounts within your account. There are limits on the number of invoices per month. You can send payment reminders and thank you messages.

# Free Agent - It allows unlimited clients, users and projects. You can track time, expenses and mileage.You can upload bank statements for analysis. Data can be exported and used in other applications.

# Billing Manager - It allows you to send and track unlimited invoices. You have an option to send billing reminders. You can add your logo and terms to your invoices.It has mobile access