You can turn on 'Hint path' option form the backend and it will show you the
templates paths.
here is a post on how to do
it:http://www.topinternetguides.com/2008/05/26/magento-tutorial-turning-on-template-path-hints/
CheersMohammedBlog: http://jamandcheese-on-phptoast.com/Email:
[email protected]: 012 139 5924
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:19:41 +1200
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [phpug] Shopping Cart recommendations
I completely agree with this, though my Magento experience is limited
to only 2 sites.
The admin interface is awesome - it has so much under the hood and if
your site needs this functionality then Magento is probably an
excellent choice. But the tradeoff is the over-the-top complexity of
getting simple customisations done. I found myself wanting to extract
basic data from the system, and having to spend hours reading up about
how to interact with a particular object, where other systems would
have been a matter of adding a basic SQL query and moving on. Luckily,
many of the frustrations I was having were shared by others, so many of
my answers were available by googling for a bit.
Adding simple HTML changes like an extra div wrapped around something
becomes a hide-and-go-seek exercise trying to find the correct phtml
file where other systems have a more intuitive folder structure for
templates. It's not that it's difficult, it's just tedious. I felt
embarrassed as a developer having to spend 30 mins to make truly
trivial changes, and constantly wondering if there is something wrong
with me and if I shouldn't go back to school.
Magento connect is a hassle too - for the reasons already mentioned.
There's nothing wrong with the 'download-unzip-upload-install' approach
that other systems use for plugins/extensions.
Also I found shifting Magento between hosts quite hard as well - not
impossible, but considerably harder than it needed to be- aside from
getting the perms right, I seem to recall having to do a str_replace on
the database dump to fix some hard-coded references to the old domain /
webroot folder and we had some issue with a cached pear file that
didn't want to play nice after the transfer. Again, this probably gets
easier after doing a few, but certainly far from intuitive the first
time.
I would use Magento again, but only for busy sites that would utilise
it's features properly and get value out of it. In our case, it wasn't
the right choice for the site and the learning curve has been quite
expensive.
Harvey.
On 16/06/2010 10:38 a.m., Aaron Cooper wrote:
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
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