Simba's Group Online Store

E-commerce Built on V-CMS 2.0

This implementation leverages all modern development standards using strongly-typed PHP 8.4+ (you can view more details about the platform's foundation here).

On the e-commerce side, and specifically for this project, the platform brings:

• Integrations with various third-party providers for shipping, card payments, and invoicing.
• A streamlined stock management system.
• Audit logging and tracking of administrator modifications.
• A comprehensive price history for products.
• A URL redirection system (301) for dead links.
• An in-dashboard notification system alongside traditional email notifications.
• A diverse reporting and analytics engine.
• Dynamic VAT management.
• A product documentation upload system utilizing a shared file repository.
• Fuzzy search capabilities across both the admin panel and the public storefront.
• Integration of the BCMath extension to eliminate classic floating-point rounding errors in PHP.
• Advanced security configurations: CSP policies and CSRF protection.
• Compliance with WCAG 2 A/AA accessibility standards.

Frontend Without React

While Single Page Application frameworks (like React) are highly popular in e-commerce, I believe this approach introduces an unjustified overhead for an online store. The practice of shipping megabytes of JavaScript just to render a functional website goes entirely against my performance principles. Therefore, for dynamic components, I chose a much lighter and highly efficient mix: HTMX and Alpine.js.

Development Workflow

The development environment implements Unit Tests, PHPStan, CS Fixer, and Playwright. The entire workspace is fully containerized using Docker.

My Favorite Feature

The homepage slider is unique: it can dynamically pull product data, supports custom image uploads, or lets you choose directly from the product's image gallery. Most interestingly, its background and accent colors are automatically adapted by extracting the dominant shades from the selected image.

While every other subsystem and feature in the application required hard engineering and was beautiful in its complexity, this slider was a passion project. It was designed specifically because the store operator lacks a dedicated marketing team, and slider layouts can easily become an aesthetic mess. This automation ensures a consistent, clean, and visually pleasing design, no matter what image is selected.

The platform is currently in its testing phase and is scheduled to launch on the market soon.