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
. 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.
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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.
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