I wanted to just say I'm thrilled with what K2 gives me the ability to do, recently I needed to come up with a custom cart solution for someone because virtuemart is too bloated and buggy (my opinion, sorry) .. and the rest of the extensions out there just couldn't do what I needed..

Here's the text from my blog about it: blog.oneduality.com/2009/09/22/shopping-cart-made-from-joomla-k2-simple-caddy-and-a-csv-import/

One of my clients had recently came to me looking for a clean shopping cart that could be ran mostly via CSV… they had a “product matrix” in excel that had categories, sub categories, item name, skew and price…

I evaluated VirtueMart which I decided was just too bulky and buggy to work with .. then I checked out dozens of others, but none were suited to our needs.. I’ve run into this issue before and decided to roll my own cart using existing tools.. I opted to use K2 (since Joomla can’t do subcategories), Simplecaddy (k2 is not a cart) and some custom tweaks..

1. K2 is an amazing content organization system that offers a far more flexible way to manage your categories/sub categories… it’s not a shopping cart, but it makes a very effective catalog .. it’s capable of acting as a blog, an event calendar, a catalog (with no ecom functionality) and many other things… built in content voting, comments and social sharing options.. it can be everything, or it can be minimal depending on what you turn on and off.

2. Simple Caddy is a basic cart system, but it lacks a catalog … it’s designed for you to be able to build your own product pages within Joomla and slap on “add to cart” button and then it provides a method to check out via paypal (only paypal is supported).

3. My own code to import a CSV into the system.. it’s job is to create the category hierarchy, add the products to simplecaddy, create the items in K2 and apply the simplecaddy tag for “add to cart” .. this CSV also adds to another database with additional information that is used to create a product selector, or I guess a better word would be a drill down search.

In addition to the three main ingredients above, I made a series of tweeks to both components to suit my needs.. some of the things I’ve done.

1. I gutted the K2 item image system, I wanted to keep it automated and simple so I have K2 looking for category images by category name and product images by product ID… this gives easy ability to just properly name some files and bulk upload them.. this was done entirely in K2 templates.

2. I added an option in Simplecaddy to disable ecom, which simply means it doesn’t appear even with the tag in place.. the reason being is that for phase one, we’re just building the catalog and leaving the cart disabled.. if the tag is in place and the simplecaddy plugin is disabled, the tag shows.. we wanted to be able to enable ecom without needing to import again, just a flip of a switch.

3. An additional payment option for simplecaddy (authorized.net)

The result is a fully functioning shopping cart solution powered off of a simple CSV file

that sounds great, I might need to follow your lead on some of this.

I followed this to your website and read the same article. I am deploying a solution for a client and finding VirtueMart the same way you found it (sorry VirtueMart guys, be cool). Just too big and bulky! I was looking for a good CCK with Ecom integration and was toying with the idea of building my own around ZOO Lite.

I would be very interested in a project with others in building a lighter solution like this around K2, and I will check out Simple Caddy.

Cheers