OpenCart is made basically of a good framework built with MVCL (Model View Controller Language). While this model offers many possibilities, the latest releases are more confuse.

Started with version 1.4.0 (February 2010), the bugs get more and more. Sometimes it seems that if the developer of OpenCart does not know what he is doing. His luck that the current users are very patient, but misusing this userbase as 'beta' testers throws some shadows on this software.

Shortly after the publishing of 1.4.0, the next version 1.4.1 came out. Nobody knew that this version had more bugs in it, it was not published as a 'beta' release, everybody thought after the unlucky publish of 1.4.0 the bugs were eleminated. While the opposite was true.

Many postings in the opencart forum are showing the confusion.

Another release (1.4.2) was shortly published after that release, while it had also some nasty bugs in it.

Release 1.4.3 (March 12. 2010) can be called something like more 'stable' (than the releases before).

With 1.4.4 (March 16. 2010) the 1.4 branch should stable, while there are now again new bugs in.

Another confusing fact is, that this developer blames many of his 3PD (3rd Party Developer) in changing important core functions (or deleting them) without any prior notice. The surprise is quite big if you (the user) install the new version and additonal (former good working) modules (and templates) - there are many thready about this in the forum of OpenCart too.

OpenCart (or to say better the developer) is lucky, because still the users help as much they can and solve many things through the forum.

There you can find many good suggestions - which many of them are refused by the developer himself because of some very obscure reasons.

To summarize this, at the moment OpenCart has many advantages, but as well also some disadvantages. The biggest drawback is the fact, that some of the core functions are not or not good working (for example sending newsletter with images), because the developers tries to stay independent, but his lack of knowledge and some very strange opinions are leading to strange results.

On example is the current package size (zipped approx. 6 MB), nearly half a megabyte more than the last stable version (1.3.6) was. This not because of new features (like MultiStore which is also not working as it should), no this is mostly because of too many redundant code lines and strange functions.