OK in this previous post (Ecommerce, Rails, Merchant Accounts Oh My!) I detailed how I was going to use Rails for the store of the UserScape website.

Well I'm here to tell you that this may be the first post in history to detail why PHP won out over Rails. Now let me say up front that it's not really Rails fault at all, but mostly my own. I did indeed start it will Rails, but after about a day of working on it I realized something very important. This was the app that every dollar my business made would pass through. Duh! Should I be writing this in a language I don't know? NO! NO! NO! I can hear you yelling at the screen right now.

So I feel back to PHP and it was the best decision I made, because once I really got in there things were a bit more complicated than I had anticipated and if I had been needing to lookup code while I was trying to do the logic it would have been a big mess. I was also able to share templates and other code I already had in the UserScape site rather than duplicating them in the Rails version of the store.

In the end everything turned out fine. The system has successfully processed both credit card and invoice transactions and I was still able to use the merchant account/gateway I signed up for previously. I was also able to sneak in some new technology by using the EZPDO O/R mapper which is very cool.