What is the best framework/cms shopping cart for a beginner php/python developer to implement? I'm potentially going to be developing a site with an online catalog of about one hundred items. Info about the items will change every year. They might add new items. They want to admin their own items and such. I'm afraid that if I use a framework, I'll have to build an admin tool for the client.
Here are a few things I've read about... Drupal with Ubercart, Zen-cart
I am not an expert but it seems that Magento is one of the leading solutions for ecommerce. It is a CMS so the user will have the capability to modify its content without the need of a custom admin tool. That should be Ok for your customer.
However, if you don't use a framework, you 'll have to build a full solution and i guess that it is a much harder task.
In terms of market share, wordpress probably has the most widely accepted platform for this kind of stuff. Part of the reason is its maintainability; another is the breadth of its secondary sources for add-ons, especially including shopping-carts. It's written in PHP over MySQL.
A project such as you describe could be accomplished by non-programmers - in many cases has been.
Market share isn't the whole story by any means, and I'm not endorsing wordpress unreservedly. But at least you'd be following a well-trodden path.
And your setup time for a fully equipped development and production server would be about 15 minutes on a hosted site for less than $25/month. Pretty low-risk.