In my earlier posts I described how I went through all of the OpenCart code to remove various unwanted features. In doing that I had stumbled across vQmod, a tool that lets you define the changes you want to make in an xml file that it then applies at runtime.
At the time I didn’t have time to play around with it, but now that the site is live I decided it was time to go back and relook at it. It’s a fairly straightforward process, and if you’re worried about another preprocessor giving you a performance hit you can turn on an option to have it cache the modified files.
It took me almost 2 days to learn the tool and redo all the changes. However that included getting Apache, PHP, mySQL, and OpenCart installed on a windows PC. This gave me an appreciation for how much easy it is to set this up using cPanel and the install scripts that Bluehost provides. So factoring that in, I’d still say it takes about the same time to do it manually or to use vQmod. But since vQmod lets you apply the changes to multiple sites and preserves the changes across upgrades it’s the way to go.
Next step is to modify my testcart installation to use vQmod.