Partex Direct OpenCart Rebuild

Posted by Joe Beahan on May 21, 2026

Partex is a leading industrial manufacturer with offices all around the world, including the UK. Partex UK recently approached us about upgrading their OpenCart website, Partex Direct.

The old Partex Direct website was one of the oldest websites we've worked with at the time of the rebuild. It had been with Partex for over a decade, running OpenCart 1.5, and hadn't been upgraded in many years. Its extensions and modules were no longer supported and were falling behind advancing web standards.

Keeping the website running smoothly became increasingly challenging with the rest of the web moving on around it, and making improvements or adapting to change was met with great difficulty.

The website is integrated with the OGL enterprise management system within which Partex manages many aspects of the business, including stock management, accounts, pricing, and of course incoming orders from the web.

This was the greatest challenge of the old Partex Direct website. It was barely integrated with the OGL system, causing numerous issues with processing orders, synchronising accounts, keeping stock updated, and various other admin tasks. The issues with integration sometimes also caused knock-on effects to other systems. In short, it did not follow OpenCart best practices.

It was clear the website was on its last legs, and a major revamp was needed to get web sales up to the level that they should be. Antropy's solution was to rebuild the website in the latest stable version of OpenCart, reimplementing the integration with OGL in a way that properly fits with the system.

For a fresh modern appearance and fast performance, the new website uses the Antropy iStore theme, with a few tweaks to match the Partex brand colours.

Whereas the old version of the site uses the end-of-life OpenStock module to manage product variants, the new site uses Devman's Options Combinations module. Antropy developed a bespoke data migration process that 'translated' the product variant information from the old module to the new, ensuring all products were carried across and nothing was left behind.

As mentioned, improving the integration with the OGL system was the largest undertaking. While the old integration had worked well enough in the past, it was detatched as a whole from the system, and its lack of support for modern languages and data formats would cause it to sometimes misinterpret incoming requests or send insufficient data, resulting in various issues interfacing with other components of the OGL system - not to mention headaches for Partex.

To this end, Antropy redeveloped the integration in accordance with OpenCart standards. We translated the code of the previous integration, written in Python, Perl and Bash, to OpenCart's native language PHP, and built it into the website as a standard OpenCart extension.

The OGL-specific controls are now fully integrated into the website's new admin panel. Staff at Partex can easily set up new customer accounts on the website, and update customer-specific discounts and shipping rates. Orders from customers are imported seamlessly into the OGL system, and product prices and stock levels are fetched directly from the OGL system so are always up-to-date.

What's more, because the integration is built entirely within OpenCart, the new website as a whole is far more maintainable, greatly reducing costs for Partex whenever they need a change or improvement in the system. It also opens up possibility for new features to be added in the future, with the new version of OpenCart having much better support from the most reputable developers of third-party extensions.

Do you have an ailing OpenCart site that needs a shake-up? Does your OpenCart site have a custom integration that is holding you back? Contact us today for a quote to bring new life to your online business!