An eCommerce Module for Contao Open Source CMS

Get the best of both worlds. Don't settle for a bridged CMS + eCommerce system. Isotope is built for the Contao CMS platform and takes advantage of all it has to offer. It is built for flexibility, speed, extendability, and is international-friendly, much like Contao itself. It lets you focus on marketing your store and managing your content. Download now to get a glimpse of where eCommerce is headed.

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Flexibility

Do things the way you want. Since Isotope is a modular system built directly into Contao CMS, you can arrange your storefront the way it makes sense for you, just like you would with any Contao module.

Full-featured

All the features you'd expect, plus all the features of Contao CMS. It has the basics, such as product listing/reader modules, checkout, product/image/order management—plus things like RSS product feeds, product filters, AJAX price variants, and lots of other cool stuff contributed by the Contao community. Of course, you'll also get all the cool features of Contao as well.

Core Power

Since Isotope is built directly within the Contao framework, it harnesses the functionality built within Contao. Things like image resizing, page caching, multiple-edit, and other core features work seamlessly, just like any other module.

A Developer's Dream

Constantly frustrated by the lack of flexibility in most open-source eCommerce systems? So were we, which is why we built Isotope with developers in mind. Not only does it use the very clean and flexible Contao framework, but it is built to be extended, much like Contao itself. You'll find Hooks for just about everything you want to tie into, as well as clean object-oriented PHP code.

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Isotope makes bridged systems cry.

Too many people think they have to settle for two systems to run their website: a CMS application and their eCommerce storefront. Unfortunately, it can make a developer want to stick forks in his eyes, as it usually means maintaining two separate systems, two sets of templates, and they rarely play nice together other than some extremely basic functionality. Well, if you are one of those people, Isotope and Contao make it easy to run all of your services on a single platform.

Download Isotope ecommerce
View the Demo

Set it up any way you want

If you're familiar with Contao, you know that it's a pretty flexible CMS system. You can set up things like blogs, calendars, and other modules pretty much however you want, and customize them until the cows come home. Well, Isotope works pretty much the same way. Since it uses standard Contao pages as "store categories", you can drop products on your pages wherever you please. There's no limit to how you want to set up your store.

Extend the Possibilities

We built Isotope so that it can be bent, stretched, and extended any which way you please. Products are designed to take on whichever attributes you can imagine. Templates can change on a per-product basis. Checkout steps can be added with ease. There are Hooks to add functionality to just about every action in the eCommerce process. Basically, Isotope is designed to work the way you want it to, whichever way that might be.

Add only what you need

Don't need a shop with all the bells and whistles? Well, you don't need to use those fancy modules and you can stick to the basics. Want to totally trick-out your store with the latest everything? You can do that, too. With Isotope you can only work with the features you need, as the entire system is modular and designed to be extended. That means you can add in features as you go without needing to configure an entire complex system.

No bridging means less headaches

Because Isotope is built directly into Contao, it blends seamlessly with your content. There are content-elements that allow you to drop in products with your content and content in next to your products. Your eCommerce shop becomes an integrated part of your website, rather than a separate area that plays by its own rules. It also means that your shop takes on the properties of your existing website themes, rather than requiring its own navigation/layouts.

Spend more time marketing and less time coding.

Contao is a very powerful CMS system that can do a lot of things. When you add integrated eCommerce to the mix, you have a pretty impressive marketing platform. Because Contao has integrated features such as social media publishing, and things like mobile browser detection (coming in Contao 2.10), so does your eCommerce shop! Essentially, whatever you can do with Contao you now have the ability to do with your eCommerce marketing, plain and simple.

Download Isotope ecommerce
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Add video, audio and more with ease

Want to add video and audio to your product descriptions? By adding Contao video extensions such as Videobox and using Contao insert tags, you can drop in videos just like you would any other piece of content. Because Isotope ties in to Contao's core structure, additional functionality is always right at your fingertips (and in the Contao Extension Repository).

Quickly create specialized landing pages

Need to create a specialized landing page for a new HTML-email or AdWords campaign? No problem. Just add a new page in Contao, then edit your products to set that page as a category. Sprinkle in some SEO, and add some campaign specific content or images, and you're set to go in a matter of minutes. Isotope makes marketing your eCommerce store as painless as possible.

SEO-friendly Out of the Box

Isotope allows you to set your own Page Titles and Meta-Descriptions on a per-product basis, all with customizable SEO-friendly URLs when using Contao's rewrite rules. The concepts all work similar to any other Contao page—each product has an alias which becomes the URL for that particular product on its reader page. And since your product category pages are simply Contao pages, editing their SEO properties works just like any normal Contao page.

Stay ahead of the curve

Contao is a great CMS known for keeping on top of major trends in website development. Why not take advantage of Contao's expertise and keep your eCommerce on par with these trends with a totally integrated system? Whether you're looking to integrate HTML5, Social Media, Mobile, AJAX, or whatever else is coming down the road, you can be sure that Contao and Isotope will be ready to handle them.

Everything you need to succeed in eCommerce

Isotope lets you build a webshop that works they way you need it to. Out of the box, you'll get a handful of modules that allow you to setup and start building the eCommerce store you've always dreamed of. Then explore the growing list of Contao 3rd party extensions available for you to choose from in order to add functionality as you need it. Don't see something you need? Feel free to submit a Feature Request to the Isotope Workgroup, and we'll see how it fits into the roadmap.

Download Isotope ecommerce
View the Demo

Major Features

  • Multilingual translations of products
  • Downloadable products
  • Custom image galleries
  • Coupon codes/rules pricing
  • Pricing per product variant
  • Watermarked images
  • Currency switching
  • 100% templatable

Modules

Product Listing Module
Drop this module on your page to list products based on settings of your choosing. 

Product Filter Module
Drop this module on your page to add filterable options to your listing module. 

Product Reader Module
This module will display information specific to a single product. 

Shopping Cart Module
Add a cart module to your page to display products added to your customer's cart. 

Checkout Module
The checkout module allows customers with products in their cart to submit address, shipping, and payment information securely through your store and logs the purchase in the orders database.

Related Products Module
Shows a list of products that are related to the specific product selected. 

Order History Module
Allows logged in customers to review a list of their previous orders.

Order Details Module
Shows specific order details from the customer's order history, and also can serve as a final checkout "Order Summary" step.

Address Book Module
Allows customers to manage their saved addresses for use during the checkout process. 

Store Config Switcher
Allows customers to switch between different store configurations and/or currencies. 

Payment Modules

  • Authorize.net
  • PayPal Standard
  • PayPal Payflow Pro
  • Epay
  • Cybersource
  • Postfinance
  • Cash (store pickup)

Shipping Modules

  • Flat rate
  • UPS
  • USPS
  • Weight Total
  • Order Total

Screenshots of Isotope in Action

Here's a whole sampling of screenshots for Isotope, both frontend and backend. You'll see that we've kept things incredibly modular, so that you can control every aspect of your store. All screenshots are of version 0.2.9, and we'll be adding more screenshots of the upcoming 1.3 release as soon as they are available.

View the Demo
<div>In your Store configuration, you can customize which billing & shipping fields are shown to customers at checkout.</div>
<div>In your Store Config, you can specify the currency to use. You can potentially have different store configurations and switch currencies using multipliers.</div>
<div>You can select default image thumbnail sizes to use from your Store Config, along with watermarks to use on all your product images if you need to.</div>
<div>In Isotope you can create emails for different languages, and use a variety of insert tags for each email to display things like cart products, billing and shipping info, etc.</div>
<div>Attributes are the basic building blocks of products. Things like size, color, weight are all attributes. You can create your own custom attributes and options in Isotope to use in shaping how different Product Types are built.</div>
<div>Product Types can be assigned to each product, along with options for multilingual translation of each product's information.</div>
<div>Product Types are built out of a combination of certain attributes. You can configure each product type for your unique situation.</div>
<div>Product Types can also define which fields are editable for variant products.</div>
<div>Shipping modules can be defined by things like subtotal options, shipping address country and subdivision, and other factors.</div>
<p>Payment options can be defined by things like selected shipping module, product types in the customer's cart, and other factors. Many payment gateways such as PayPal and Authorize.net are supported.</p>
<div>You can set up multitudes of tax rates by country, subdivision, and even postal code range.</div>
<div>Tax classes contain groups of tax rates and can be assigned to each product. For situations where you need to display the taxes included in the price, you have that option as well.</div>
<div>Product management displays your products and their variants in a tree format that is searchable and filterable.</div>
<div>Product variants are sub-products that can vary by things like size, color, and most importantly, price. By combining different attributes on a given product you can create many different combinations. Isotope can create these combinations for you automatically based on the attribute options you choose.</div>
<p>Isotope provides a "Quick-Edit" view to quickly manage a product's variant options.</p>
<div>Product Categories are derived directly from your existing Contao page structure, making it easy to create new categories and have them seamless adapt to your site's navigation just like any normal page.</div>
<div>Isotope has its own Media Management system that separates product images and other media from your normal Contao filesystem.</div>
<div>Publishing products is the same as it is for other Contao content. You can choose to schedule when certain products are available and when they should be un-published from the site.</div>
<div>Isotope includes a Rules module that allows you to manage things like Product discounts and sales. Shown are the basic rules options.</div>
<div>Advanced Rules can be specific to certain Member Groups, Store Configs, Product Types and even specific members and products.</div>
<div>Coupon codes are available along with a multitude of configuration options for how they should be applied.</div>
<div>The Isotope Checkout module assembles things like Payment and Shipping modules and other configuration options. Different checkout modules could potentially exist for different customers, such as for Retail and Wholesale customers.</div>
<div>All orders are saved in a backend management module, where you can sort/filter to your liking as well as do things like capture payment and manage shipping statuses.</div>
<div>The listing module and filter modules for Isotope. See the demo for more of them in action.</div>
<div>The frontend Product Reader. See the demo for more of them in action.</div>
<div>Isotope provides an infinite number of ways to display carts on your page. Pictured here are two cart modules: one styles as a "mini-cart" on the left and a "full-cart" on the right. See the demo for more of them in action.</div>
<div>The frontend Checkout Module. See the demo for more of it in action.</div>
     

A growing Open-source project

Like Contao, Isotope is a true Open-source project that depends on the involvement and participation of the user community in order to help do things like fix bugs, test security, suggest features, and generally help guide the roadmap for the project. We keep all our code publicly available here, and encourage people to download from the SVN to test out what we have int he works.

More importantly, we encourage you to sign up for GitHub in order to participate in discussions, submit tickets, and also let us know how you are using Isotope in your own projects.

We fully pledge to keep Isotope a 100% Open-source development project and to make it one of the best eCommerce options anywhere, and we need your help to do it. Sign up today and let's help change the eCommerce landscape.

The Isotope Workgroup Team
(Andreas, Blair and Fred)