I've had the chance to work with x-cart now on one full project from start to finish, and am working on some customizations, database integration with another x-cart project. Here's my initial comment on the x-cart system.

I have to say that for the most part, I had always heard good things about x-cart, and hadn't had the chance myself to integrate it into a site that needed a mid-size ecommerce core with all the bells and whistles right out of the box...

Overall, I'm really fairly impressed with the general ecommerce features and functionality, however, the templates are horrible at best... I almost vomited after opening the 200$ zip file to find a disgusting arrangements of table all over the damn place for layout elements throughout the site.

I will say for now that I am forced into a couple of x-cart templates that were pre-coded with the tables in mind, so properly converting either of these to xhtml/css would be a time-consuming nightmare that the client is not prepared to pay for.

Before I make the decision to use x-cart again on any of my personal projects, or for a client of my own, I will have to evaluate the other shopping carts again, and review their default template code to ensure it is using a nice CSS layout rather that ten billion tables to hold content. Either that, or I will have to take the time consuming process on myself, and convert a default x-cart install to a CSS template with zero tables... I'm not looking forward to either...

yawn...