My advice is being sought in some web design and deployment matters for a friend as well as for a client (I just maintain their existing site right now).

The friend wants to set up an online store which will likely also have some news and likely a blog of some sort. My first instinct based on looking into CMS in the past, was to likely go with Drupal or even WordPress (both require shopping plugins for commerce). However, there's a lot more out there now I think.

Just found Freeway which bills itself as the best (most advanced) open source eCommerce solution. It has support for products as well as services and subscriptions. [ edit: Don't think I'm liking their admin interface - doesn't seem it would be friendly in the slightest to non-techie types ]

I know some of you must have set up similar eCommerce stores or CMS-based sites with an eCommerce portion.

I'm looking for something that will be easy for me to deploy as well as create (or help to create) templates for. Ultimately it must also be easy for the site owner(s) to use the admin interfaces to manage their stores as well (product changes and additions,writing blog posts, etc..) Something with great support from the installed community is also an advantage. That means potential for some existing templates as a starting point as well as additional modules one won't have to write themselves.

I may need help some help with the installation. I've never installed one of these yet. I had Joomla installed on a test site in 2006 ad thought it seemed overly complicated and just a mess. Same with osCommerce.

I use zenCart, and I like it for the most part. It's based on osCommerce, so it'd probably be about the same setup time, but it's supposed to be a lot easier to skin with CSS. Ymmv.

If you're truly worried about an admin interface for a non-techie, I'd probably stick with Wordpress and a plugin. I've yet to see a CMS system with an easier-to-use admin interface than Wordpress. I tried an earlier version of Drupal and could not figure it all out, so I moved to Joomla, which I liked, but that admin system is pretty bad too.

The search continues.... Leading the pack now:

ExpressionEngine - seems to be a fantastic CMS with a standard design-oriented approach to making page templates coupled with a lot of nice modules, including forums. Commercial at $285, but if it's as good as it sounds that's a small price. Huge drawback for commerce is that it has only a very simple store module that uses PayPal's cart feature. No on-site cart or killer item management. Speculation is that a full-blown commerce module will come with the new 2.0 version sometime this year.

Magento - looks like an excellent and clean upcoming full commerce solution. This includes templating like a CMS but geared toward a store-only site. This lacks the breadth of features found in EE above, but does the store and cart thing very well. Still in pre-release state with full production version scheduled for sometime this quarter.

If both of those were merged into one product I think we'd have the definitive winner here.

I find all this stuff super confusing. I feel like I had an easier time writing my shopping cart in PHP that wrapping my head around these systems. Probably because they throw around their own terminology and way of doing things. One great aspect to the above is that they both seem more flexible than many other systems out there in terms of page design for the front-end.

I could probably get away with converting my own site to EE and re-using my own PHP-based shopping cart. But my cart would not be a suitable solution for the other sites I'd like to get moved over to and developed with a CMS. Mainly because of larger item selection in their stores as well as needing the store owners to be able to make edits and changes themselves through a nice web UI.