No man serverside code is great... we could not have this forum without it... it's is just a logic thing to truly seperate content from design, and make it possible to update your site dynamicly or like here let visitors take advantage of it :bow:

It is true that php is not the language with the most ease of use debugging capabillities... although an IDE like Zend Studio will give you some proper tools.

OS Commerce is a great opensource product only it is showing it's age.. and the interface is sometimes unclear. The way you talk about it though i suspect you mean the templating system.. the core templates suck.. but with the sts plugin you can use a normal html file :bow:

Anyways.. I will stop now telling you how great php and opensource is as i am going offtopic too much :p