OpenCart Communities - A Source of Know-How, Inspiration and Support
According to Linux founder Linus Torvalds, one of the most exciting experience when building up the platform was growing up of the community from himself to 100 people. According to Linus, the growth from 101 to the hundreds of millions today was nothing exciting.
What is a community anyway?
According to a definition in Meriram-Webster dictionary:
A community is a social unit of any size that shares common values…
To list a few main characteristics:
Community has a goal.
Community cares.
Community helps.
Community discusses.
Community shares.
In this blog post we will be exploring these underlying characteristics targeting another growing open source community - that of OpenCart. With tens of dozens OpenCart communities spread around the world we will share our personal favorites.
Our team would like to thank to every community creator/admin/moderator for the hard work they pull. Surely OpenCart would not be the same without your help.
If you are running an OpenCart community and you are not mentioned in this post, please share your community in the comments section and we will be happy to add it.
#1 Forums
We will start with the Community Forums.
OpenCart Forum
Members: 95,336
Official Language: English
Total posts: 552,484
With a total number of 95,336 members (at the time of writing this post), the OpenCart Community Forums are by far the largest single source of first-hand knowledge and information.
The OpenCart staff also actively participates in the discussions and topics. Whether you are just starting out with the platform, or you are already an advanced user, you will always be able to find useful information.
The registration for the forum is free and it takes less than a minute to complete. Once you are registered you can post in the threads and interact with the other community members. The forum itself, is organized in different sections with many sub forums where you are able to ask questions and find answers.
Each section may have its moderator and they are listed in blue. The administrators are listed in red. Before posting in the forum make sure you read the General forum rules.
Your localized OpenCart community
While the forum’s main communication language is English, there is a sub-section speaking your language. This makes the OpenCart forum a meeting point for all the local communities.
In the screenshot above we can see Czech, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch and Norwegian to name a few. This is a great place to meet with local entrepreneurs and discuss ideas, strategies, issues, suggestions and anything in between.
Brazil Forum
Members: 28,000
Official language: Portuguese
Total posts: 55,499
The Brazillian forum is run by OpenCart Brazil, an official partner for over 5 years. The forum has more than 28,000 members and offers a lot of support topics including OpenCart themes, installations, extensions and even has an area where developers can contribute their modules/code for free.
Russian Forum
Members: 6,457
Official language: Russian
Total posts: 18,042
Currently, there are about 6,457 members in the Russian forum for OpenCart. With over 2,000 topics, the forum covers all aspects of setting up, maintaining, configuring and customizing an Ecommerce website running on OpenCart.
Arabic Forum
Members: 80
Official language: Arabic
Total posts: 72
Arab users can seek knowledge and assistance on their native language in the Arabic forum for OpenCart. The community there offers installation and update services, as well as open discussions, inquiries and updates for new releases. You might also want to check their Facebook page.
Chinese Forum
Members: 23,467
Official language: Simplified Chinese
Total posts: 10,927
This is the Chinese OpenCart community where about 23,467 members share their tips and tricks, and discuss hot topics including technology development and business cooperation. It’s a place where Chinese OpenCart users can freely ask for help about a problem and start sharing their own advice and experience with other members.
#2 Q/A Sites
Let's continue with the Q/A sites where users can search for answers on multiple topics and ask their own questions for authors to answer.
Quora
According to its founder, Quora aims to be the easiest place to write new content and share content from the web. What a better place to ask a question and get an answer. You can easily search for any topic. The OpenCart topic on Quora for instance has more than 1,000 viewers. Authors are ranked based on their activity, informability and quality of answers. Here is a preview of a Quora question and its corresponding answer.
Yahoo! Answers
Similar to Quora, Yahoo! Answers is another source that offers first-hand information on hot OpenCart topics. As you see from the screenshot, each question has at least one answer, which means that the community there is also active.
One of the main principles of Reddit is to be a sharer of knowledge not a self promoter. Perhaps this is one of the reasons The OpenCart community in Reddit is smaller compared to others. Still a great place to ask a question and get help from other fellow Reddit OpenCartians.
#3 Social Networks
Social media - the ultimate place for finding new connections and community interaction.
Google+ Community
OpenCart is getting speed in social networks. Everyone who has a Google+ profile might want to check the Google+ OpenCart community. The Google+ community has around 1200 members who can interact with each other. The community is run and operated by iSenseLabs.
The official Facebook page of OpenCart has 6,352 fans (at the time of writing this post). It’ run and operated by OpenCart. There you can find information about system and module updates, promotions, posts from the OpenCart blog, etc.
The largest Facebook Group related to the platform is called OpenCart Ecommerce, with a total of 3,544 members that are steadily growing. Similar to the forums, OpenCart users share their knowledge and ask questions for issues they might be experiencing.
Twitter is all about brevity which means that users are able to quickly access a lot of information. A simple search for OpenCart will show you the official Twitter account of the free open-source shopping cart. You can also filter every OpenCart tweet by using a hashtag as in #opencart.
Summary
To be a part of the OpenCart community means that you have access to first-hand advice and knowledge. We hope you find this post useful, and if you have not done this yet - join the OpenCart community!
