We have to develop an Ecommerce site with 20+ pages of static content which needs a CMS and a store or 30+ products. We use Magento or Cubecart for Ecommerce and Wordpress or Joomla for CMS sites.
Which has the best of both worlds - a good CMS with Store management? I am not sure if a Wordpress CMS site with an Shopping cart plugin will be a scalable solution.. Any advice?
I generally prefer to use the open source DashCommerce. I have installed and use this across many small sites and I get nothing but rave reviews for it. The key here is that non-technical people are able to get around in it and manage the content without any problem at all. And it is great for geeks too in that you have full access to everything...read - tweak till your hearts content!
You can check:
http://www.dotshoppingcart.com/ free
http://www.nopcommerce.com/ free
http://www.storefront.net/ buy
And based on your needs you can select.
Since it seems you're already comfortable with Joomla and since your store is pretty small, you might want to simply add an E-Comm extension:
It's not open source, but I'd recommend checking out Verb CMS (http://verbcms.com/), which is a hosted CMS service with fully integrated eCommerce. It's super cool.
WordPress with e-Commerce plugin seems to be a simple and elegant solution: http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/ Joomla with VirtueMart is a fairly feature heavy combination: http://virtuemart.net/
I'm a big fan of Drupal for a full-featured CMS, and though it has a bit of learning curve, it's worth it for its flexibility and power. Its e-Commerce module is excellent as well, and integrates nicely to create online stores. Both are totally free, open-source goodness, with a large, supportive community.
I would use Magento, it is based on the Zend Framework and it is the best PHP solution, well documented, OO.
Great discussion I have use virtuemart for my site let me show it http://ebookideal.com/
How about giving a try to http://www.seotoaster.com ?
It is open source and free. It also has a bunch of built-in SEO features, such as building stores using micro-formats, link siloing and more.
I second Michel here. I use SEOTOASTER for my store located at http://www.greenevent.biz. It is a very intuitive system and the integrated SEO works miracle for a small business. Highly recommended !