Magento
I’ve tried out some of commercial shops and also some open source like osCommerce, but I forgot them when i saw Magento. It does not impress with easy installation or intuitive configuration, or even speed. No, no, that are not advantages of Magento, but at first disadvantages. But nevertheless that osCommers systems captures my primary interest. So why?
It is done professional! Yes, in my opinion that describes all advantages of that shop short. Cause in comparison to others shop systems it offers very much functionality and flexibility out of the box, combined with good looking default template. Just visit the demo-shop of Magento to see it self. I will not describe every detail of Magento here, cause it was done many times before, like that article, which describes (in German) why Magento is flexible, self-contained, individual, and is prepared for the future. But the best impression you can make by trying it out. I tried it for you and i can point some disadvantages to.
The greatest disadvantage of that system is that its powered by Zend Framework. Wait! You are Zend Framework evangelist? Let me explain. I don’t say that Zend Framework is bad, no i say – it’s slow 
! Of cause it may be that Magento is so bad written on that brilliant framework making it, so slow, i don’t know, but it is really, really slow on normal PHP without Zend engine. And it’s don’t comes out with standard 8Mb configuration of your PHP engine, it needs at least 20Mb, otherwise it not works.
And of cause you need some not ever usual extensions of your PHP (which is PHP 5.2.0 or newer):
- PDO/MySQL
- MySQLi
- mcrypt
- mhash
- simplexml
- DOM
I called my host provider before a had all required addons. But i was supported by good installation routine in this exercise.
Further my shop installation was not such intuitive as it can be in the admin area, but it’s OK, cause there are really many configuration possibilities that have to be placed somewhere. I think it will mature in the future and is not so relevant at all ,cause admins will learn how to configure Magento, but customer will/must not learn it. And precisely customers will like your Magento usability, i think.
Last but not least my version (0.6.13…) of Magneto was pretty buggy. After doing some configuration steps in admin area the store produces errors (Zend Framework pointed me to SQL Errors) and was no more functional anymore 
. That are of cause teething problems, that are possibly already fixed in the new Version: “… Fixed few database foreign keys problems …“.
Finally i would say, that Magento is best online shop system that i know at the moment, i will stay watching Magento development and will try out newer matured versions. But at the moment Magento is not really ready for productive run, especially the slowness of the systen is greatest disadvantage of Magento for me.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
I also tried many shop and magento seems to have all the requirement that I want.
I finally made my shop with it and got customers.
Thanks to the good ranking in Google.
Hi Matt,
we also think, that Magento is the best open source shop right now – full of useful features, easy to use and very flexbile. Version 1 had some problems with the perfomance, but with the new release 1.1 there is a performance-boost of about 40 percent and Magento is no longer that slow. We´ve developed a Shop with more than 23.000 products and we´ve no performance-problems – not a all. The only thing is that you need a dedicated optimized server (best case: quad-core). But a server should not be the bottleneck starting a webshop.
I’ve been testing Magento for a while and I must say it’s unbelievably slow on standard hosting. I remember version 1.x being much slower than current version (1.1.6), but now it’s not good at all. Unfortunately this eCommerce solution needs well configured dedicated server to work. No chance to be satisfied using even very good shared hosting.
I guess this post was done way before Bigcommerce came to the market. However bigcommerce is based on interspire ultimate edition and this existed at a time of this article. My argument is magento is not the best ecommerce software there is out there. I have implemented for customers before and none of my customers found it easy to use. Comments from my customers were “The software has great features but to hard to remember how to use it”. One other problem I found with magento is that it is a very heavy software. It requires High hotsing specs otherwise it will be a complete drag. I Personally recommend the Bigcommerce http://bigcommerce.com/
Thank your for replies.
Meanwhile I’m also not a biggest friend of Magento. Problems of Magento is its complexity in the code and configuration. To many technologies and methods in mix with bad (or no) documentation. To many time waste for maintenance or customization.
But it’s still the best one of the open source shops (IMHO)
[...] posted about Magento before and how great of a program it is. Well, I’ve also come to see the hard side of Magento now as well. The side that Brandon is always telling me about. Magento’s learning curve is [...]