In the midst of some downtime, I finally got around to doing something I’d planned to do for 2 or 3 years; give autosystems.ie a complete rewrite/redesign. At the moment the homepage is a mess of static content and things don’t get much better when we look at the shopping cart system. The shopping cart as it stands right now is a pretty hacked up version of OSCommerce which has been slowly disintegrating over the past year. No less than 4 times in the past year I’ve had a call from my brother where it had broken unexpectedly, seemingly without any user interaction whatsoever.

So I decided to set about developing a really simple shopping cart system which would be a snap to maintain and which my brother would find easy to use. I also needed to implement a really lightweight CMS so that he could change some page elements on the homepage informing people of new offers and the like. 4 hours later and I’ve got a pretty nifty Ajax shopping cart system working. There’s still quite a bit to do (payment functionality with PayPal/Authorize.net for one) but on the whole I’m amazed at how quickly it came together. Well, maybe not that amazed, I have been using it to develop Runt over the past few months.