I have been working with a client who wants something simple, yet oddly complicated added to their website. It is a restaurant who wants to be able to allow their customers to pre-order food online and have it waiting for them when they arrive to the restaurant.

As usual the site was designed with my personal favorite, Joomla. When I was going through the various options I looked at extensions available for this, but nothing was the right pick. They were all too in depth and do not offer the simplicity needed. All I need is to be able to add items to a virtual cart, add a total and email the restaurant (and the customer) the order. No payment, no checkout.

Then I decided to try some old fashion methods of using cookies since I don't really have a need to go fancy and save the order and use sessions. This worked fine when I used the desktop version, but then found that some of the mobile clients did not agree with this method. It was back to the drawing board.

Now I was about to step into the world of JQuery for my next attempt. When I started to do my research on how I would approach this method I found an interesting tool, called simpleCart(js)

This met all my criteria, plus it's free and open source! It was very easy to implement into Joomla, all I did was call the file from my template's index.php. Then I added the call to create the cart. Using the html editor built into JCE (another favorite!) it filled in so well.

So if you are looking for a simple shopping cart, it's named perfectly for what it does. They are anticipating a new version this month which I am excited to see and will be using it again for the quick shopping carts that I may need. I want to try it's call back to paypal one day soon.