Yep, I know about the hint path - it helps, but it's not always useful
when the change needs to happen in an XML file etc. I'd rather the
templating system was intuitive so this feature wasn't required.
Harvey.
On 16/06/2010 11:37 a.m., S.Mohammed Alsharaf wrote:
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/
Cheers
Mohammed
Blog: http://jamandcheese-on-phptoast.com/
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: 012 139 5924
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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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