thoughts on magento as eCommerce platform? easy to manipulate design, flow, and site?

[dalearyous]

most of the websites i do are either completely from scratch, from design PSD files sliced up, joomla, drupal, and other random content management systems.

i HATE the ecommerce solutions for drupal and joomla and was wondering how magento held up? i have read tons of reviews and i accept the cons and the pros are fantastic. however the complete backend is for store management. for the developer, how easy is it to rewrite some of the code, change the design and layout? does anyone have any recommendations for a great place for themes that has great support?

 

[chusteczka]

Unfortunately, it seems the topic of ecommerce shopping carts receives little discussion on this forum. Questions like yours never receive a response.

I have not yet used a shopping cart but have been considering doing so.

Here are a couple reviews of Magento that seem different from the rest and useful.

OpenSourceStrategies.com - Quick Comparison of Magento vs Spree eCommerce Platforms


ITWebExperts.com - Which Shopping Cart Should I use?

Magento
Website: http://www.magentocommerce.com
Magento is one of the newer shopping carts on the block but has already attracted a large following. The coding is based on the latest PHP 5 object oriented coding standards and the Zend framework.

Advantages +
+ Varian the company who backs the cart is very active in updating the code and fixing bugs
+ Multi-Store Capable
+ Nice default template

Disadvantages -
- Heavily layered and overly complicated coding style and thousands of files requires a lot of time to learn and do customizations. Estimate about 2 - 5 x more for your budget for customizing it vs. other carts
- Right now the technical documentation is very limited, making it difficult to customize and modify the programming of Magento beyond doing graphical changes.
- Runs fairly slow. Plan on spending at least $25/month for a 1000 product store, or $50 - $100 month for stores with over that.

Wikipedia - Comparison of shopping cart software


Here are the few that have caught my attention for further consideration.

Agora Cart
Big Commerce - PHP, MySQL
CS-Cart - PHP, MySQL
Magento - PHP, MySQL
Ror-e.com - Ruby on Rails
Spree - Ruby on Rails
Substruct - Ruby on Rails
X-Cart - PHP, MySQL
Zen Cart - PHP, MySQL


I like the development taking place with Ruby on Rails but my first impression is the carts are not yet developed enough. I need to look into this area further.

 

[Markbnj]

Unfortunately, it seems the topic of ecommerce shopping carts receives little discussion on this forum. Questions like yours never receive a response.

I wouldn't say they never receive a response, but when you ask questions about a specific product there is either someone here with experience on it, or there isn't.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

I have used Magento in two stores. It is incredibly feature rich and can do a lot, way more than something like Zen Cart.

Unfortunately, it is *incredibly* confusing and hard to figure out from a code level. Design, layouts, and especially coding additional functionality, is all so effing confusing it's not even funny. And the technical documentation is often horrible or non-existent.