The leanest and meanest of the 'next generation' of shopping carts that includes heavyweights Magento and Prestashop, OpenCart is nevertheless a favorite among developers for it's clear cut architecture and accessibility, and among store owners for well, the same reasons really, only applied to usability rather than coding.

OpenCart offers the basic requirements of a shopping cart with a smaller set of features out-of-the-box than Prestashop, but what it does, it does well. The main product image is added in the 'Data' tab, but adding an unlimited number of additional product images is easy to do via the 'Image' tab after you've selected the product via Catalog->Products.

Clicking the main product image at the top of the store-side product info page activates a Thickbox popup containing a larger version of the image. If more than one image is added to the product in admin Thickbox will allow you to view all other images at the same (large) size.

Another result of applying multiple images to an OpenCart product is that the 'Additional Images' will become populated with them, enabling the same 'click for Thickbox' functionality as with the main product image at the top.

Whilst the use of a tab to contain extra images does save space on the page and is convenient to use, that's about it as far as product image presentation goes with OpenCart. It's certainly a step up from first generation carts like osCommerce and even Zen Cart but there is still room for significant improvement.

There is no default functionality which links images to product options, so there is plenty of scope for PAPs to add valuable capability in this respect.

Where does PAPs come in?

PAPs can improve on default OpenCart image presentation capabilities in several areas. Firstly, it offers 10 alternative popup and zoom engines to OpenCart's Thickbox.

The PAPs viewing area is placed between the main product image and data, and the tabs below. This allows users to make changes to their option selections via PAPs and not lose track of what they've selected. PAPs allows larger numbers of images to be displayed within scroll panes, keeping the space needed for image displays to a minimum whilst maintaining ease of use. Thumbnails can be applied along any edge of the enlarged PAPs image and you can apply stylish Javascript image transformation effects to give your images a glossy, or rounded look for example.

Furthermore, with PAPs you can use composite images to represent combinations of option selections if more than one option is available for a single product. This can be achieved by either uploading separate images for each option combination, or by merging existing individual option value images to created the composite representing the selected combination.

Add to this the watermarking feature, bulk copy feature and flexible ordering positioning functionality and you have an indispensable product display utility for a successful web store.