Anyone recommends magento?

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Eran
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Anyone recommends magento?

Post by Eran »

I am looking into OS ecommerce solutions right now. Previously I've had experience with oscommerce and zencart, both of which were pretty bad. I just noticed magento is based on the Zend Framework, anyone can give a heads up on previous experience with it?
josh
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Re: Anyone recommends magento?

Post by josh »

They reinvent a lot of wheels. Theres lots of places they implement exceptions and then catch the exception and return false ( reminds me of the @ operator.. bad practice ) also see my blog post to get an overall idea of their operation:
http://joshribakoff.com/2009/01/major-m ... arguments/

That being said my phones been ringing off the hook for this plugin I wrote. If it dont make dollars it dont make cents.

P.s. they invented their own tier called the block ( view helpers that model business logic ) They also use a singleton registry as the standard way of passing models to the view, you'll love it ;-) ( just kidding )
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Eran
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Re: Anyone recommends magento?

Post by Eran »

Yeah, I've been working with it for the last couple of hours and I'm definitely disappointed. The last time I saw so much needless indirection, it was in Joomla, and this is even worse. With such a strong foundation as ZF, how could they go so wrong? did they not read the tutorial at the very least on suggested module structure? the design is such an over-complication of a not so complicated problem.

Another major annoyance is that it wasn't developed for Windows (I didn't know it was possible to make PHP systems not work in Windows without meaning to). It had tons of problems just installing and (gasp!) logging into the administration. Not to mention it's extremely slow on the localhost, and has one of the worst UI I have seen to date.

I thought I might be using this is in my next project, but I'll probably develop from scratch... maybe I'll borrow some API code to some of the billing gateways, but that's about it. Maybe I'll release it as OS at the end if I have the spare time
josh
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Re: Anyone recommends magento?

Post by josh »

Yeah 4+ second load times in the admin, but some clients don't care. I didnt experience any windows specific issues personally. I've found none of the platforms are perfect, they're the only ones that have open sourced their platform that use objects half properly tho. Its over complicated but I'm probably more productive in it than I would be with oscommerce ( not by much ). Really the only components they use from Zend is Zend_Select and a few other. They wrote their own FC, Layout, Action controller, etc.. and got that part totally wrong. That's one place Joomla was spot on. I think comparing it to Joomla tho is unfair, Joomla is pretty darn good for OS.
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greyhoundcode
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Re: Anyone recommends magento?

Post by greyhoundcode »

Don't mean to crash the post or whatever, but did you persevere with Magento? Got to start a (initially smallish) e-store by the end of the week and so I'm doing a quick bit of research on possible platforms.
alex.barylski
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Re: Anyone recommends magento?

Post by alex.barylski »

Does anyone know of a single project which serves as a good example of how to use the Zend framework?

I've seen a few interesting projects done in CodeIgnitor (CMS mostly) but CI is a hack...

It'd be interesting to look into an nice open source project based on ZF. Unfortunately most frameworks only come with a trivial hangman type applicaiton, which does no favours for anyone. Seems the hardest part, everyone wants to avoid. :P

Cheers,
Alex
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Bill H
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Re: Anyone recommends magento?

Post by Bill H »

(I didn't know it was possible to make PHP systems not work in Windows without meaning to)
:)
tanja
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Re: Anyone recommends magento?

Post by tanja »

Sorry for the question but I wonder what is magento for?
josh
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Re: Anyone recommends magento?

Post by josh »

E-commerce, if you search for their site it explains it all
Micron21-Sarah
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Re: Anyone recommends magento?

Post by Micron21-Sarah »

I didn't realise it was that bad!

Thanks for the info dudes, won't be recommending this one to clients in the future...
josh
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Re: Anyone recommends magento?

Post by josh »

It's actually not that bad. The code beats oscommerce and clients like it better.... what store do you use?
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greyhoundcode
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OpenCart

Post by greyhoundcode »

Slight tangent I know as the thread was started for Magento, but for anyone who is interested I'll just chip in that I plumped for OpenCart, and as a means of quickly deploying a shop and being easily themable, what an absolute pleasure it was to work with.

Documentation is certainly thin on the ground, yet it was easy to get to grips with nonetheless - and an added bonus in this case was the clear and uncluttered admin pages (the client was very dismayed by a demo of Zen Cart's backend 8O ).

Not suitable for every job I'm sure, but as I say if anyone needs to quickly roll out a nicely themed site in a very short period then OpenCart is worth a look.
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