We've done one multiple site store with Magento and it's an extremely powerful shopping solution. It has everything, and what it doesn't have is almost always available as an extension (many are commercial). When we did this site, I was working with DPS to get a neglected Fontis PXPay extension working and republished after a bout of testing. To my knowledge, DPS have taken over maintaining the extension and it works.
But there are a few trade offs to Magento: 1. It is a rather confusing structure, both physically and programmatically - even for a Zend project. You get used to it, but sometimes it's difficult to even know what data objects a particular template even has access to. An example of this is a simple email confirmation template took hours to get functional simply because there was a syntax change in the core methods, the change was poorly documented, and we couldn't find a way to get the required data outputing to the template. Forum posts started appearing with the same issue, and eventually a worked out the issue. 2. The templating system is a tedious setup. Multiple template directories loaded with phtml files, multiple yaml or xml files for configuration. You'll get used to it faster if you have experience with an MVC framework, but even then it's a rather inefficient setup to manage for a first time Magento builder. 3. For such a popular project with mountains of submitted extensions, community support is very quiet, and core devs rarely hit the forums since Magento is also a commerical product. Quite often, you will find yourself on your own unless it is a common problem. You will find tons of unanswered questions in their forums, some you would think are rather basic level queries for any web application. 4. The upgrade/extension installation process, while very slick when running, requires that the entire base code is chmod to 777, and then chmod back to normal when done. There is a way of doing this safely with a shell command found somewhere in their blog, but the fact that you need root access just to add an extension (instead of "ftp this directory" on other systems) is a bit of a PITA. 5. CMS capabilities are extremely basic. Unless the latest version has changed, you don't even get a WYSIWYG editor. There are a few extensions for adding one however. Magento Enterprise ($11k per year) has a beefed up CMS system. There are also quite a few posts out there for bridging Magento with Wordpress and Typo3. (The latter being the more mature bridge project from what I saw) We invested alot of time in Magento, sometimes cursing the choice - but it was just a learning curve. In the end the client is happy and it has everything they need and then some. After this process, I would only consider it for serious ecommerce businesses with hundreds of products and the need for auxillary ecommerce services (like vouchers, matrix rate shipping, tiered pricing). Anything less, and I would be more comfortable with one of the CMS+Cart solutions already mentioned. Cheers Aaron ----- Original Message ----- From: Paul Bennett To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2010 9:24 AM Subject: Re: [phpug] Shopping Cart recommendations Thanks Dan, I need multi currency support (seems to be a no-go for wp e-commerce / getshopped?) as well as some good flexibility for freight on a per-country and / or per item basis. Given past experience, I'd rather configure this using the shopping cart software than build this myself, so Magento is looking like a possibility, as well as Drupal + Ubercart (I'd be more convinced if the ubercart demo wasn't so crap). The default Drupal admin isn't the most user-friendly, but in my experience if your content types are set up correctly and your taxonomy is sane then it isn't too bad. Paul On 16/06/2010, at 9:05 AM, Dan Milward wrote: WordPress + GetShopped.org New Zealand solution. Kick ass. Never have to scare your customer by showing them a drupal admin interface. Magento is hard to get your head around and hard to custom theme. At least that's what people tell me. Go getshopped.org Ciao, Dan Sent from my iPhone On 16/06/2010, at 8:54 AM, S.Mohammed Alsharaf <[email protected]> wrote: Magento is a great shopping cart system. It might be hard to work with if you are not familiar with Zend Framework or OOP, but not impossible. With Magento you will never need to hack the core files. If anything in the core files that you don't like its easy to extend it. Files structure app/ core/ ----> core classes you don't touch local/ ----> your custom classes that overrides or extends core classes community/ ----> custom code from Magento community design/ default/ ----> default design and you can add more folders for your custom templates With the templates you are not limited with one template contains everything a page will have, but its based on blocks. Everything is a block even the main layout. For example you would have /design/default/checkout/cart/summary.phtml If you want to just customize the look of the cart summary then you can create /design/my_custom_design/checkout/cart/summary.phtml and in a config xml file you define the new template. Also you can choose to show the custom design in all pages or some. Thats just some of the features Hope I helped :) Mohammed Blog: http://jamandcheese-on-phptoast.com/ Email: [email protected] Mobile: 012 139 5924 > From: [email protected] > To: [email protected] > Subject: [phpug] Shopping Cart recommendations > Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 20:26:59 +1200 > > Hi all, > > Any recommendations on PHP shopping cart software that integrates with > a variety of gateways (DPS, Paypal etc)? > > I've used SilverStripe's ecommerce and payment modules in the past, > but am looking for something a bit more full featured and that I can > extend and customise without needing to hack core files (yes, I know I > can probably do this with the SS modules, but it wasn't immediately > obvious) > > Bonuses: > * real, up to date, usable documentation > * flexible templating > * active developer / user community > > Will consider paid as well as FOSS. > > I've heard good things about Magento - any opinions? > > Thanks for any pointers. > > > Paul Bennett > MoveForward - Web Development for Design Companies > http://www.moveforward.co.nz > Ph. 06 308 9722 > Mob. 027 255 8495 > > -- > NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug > To post, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe, send email to > [email protected] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- MSN NZ Travel Find a way to cure that travel bug -- NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -- NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -- NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -- NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected]
