Question posted in 
I’m just learning PHP, but I was wondering to the advanced PHP programmers; how long would it take you to code a shopping cart exactly like osCommerce from scratch?
I’m just interested in seeing how quickly others can code a fully functional shopping cart like osCommerce, and hopefully what I can look forward to do one day once I learn PHP fluently.
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Answers
It really depends on the feature set you want to implement. A really simple cart for a basic personal website wouldn’t take more than a day of casual coding, but a heavy-duty feature-rich cart would take substantially more time.
It also depends on the site you’re integrating with; some sites are an absolute pain to work with, while others are clear and easy to decipher. The most complex sites can have hundreds of different cases for the cart to handle, which can easily multiply your development time.
I’ve built a few online shops now, the last one with probably most (not all) of the features of osCommerce. It took me about 4 or 5 days to get it up and running, and I’ve been building on it, off and on since then.