My Thoughts on Magento
Having recently completed a brief for a client using the open source e-commerce solution Magento, I decided that I’d share a few of my thoughts; over the next few weeks I’ll be posting more in depth tips and techniques that I found useful whilst completing the brief.
First, a quick plug for the site I created. I was lucky enough to work with James Choularton, a local businessman who runs an outdoor clothing and ski shop called Outdoor Traders. After surveying the options available for e-commerce, I decided to pitch Magento to James; mostly because of its excellent feature set and the promise of more features on the horizon. The standout features for me were:
- Support for multiple websites, stores or store views; a feature which turned out to be crucial to the success of the site
- Great options for layered navigation; ie. shop by brand/colour/size
- A great ‘one page checkout’ implementation
- Feature rich account functionality for end users
- An active user group, with plenty of support forums etc.
- Some great extensions adding useful functionality
The entire project has taken me 2 months from start to finish; including adding 2000 SKUs, creating 3 different themes, coding lots of new features into both the frontend and backend, and installation on a virtual dedicated server. Throughout the whole process I found that Magento was sometimes frustrating to use, but on the whole a great experience.
Adding products was the most tedious task, because Magento doesn’t yet offer a matrix functionality (to input multiple colour and size options for a product at once). The design was relatively easy, I took one of the core themes created by the Magento team and completely customised the images, colours and design choices until I achieved the look we were after. I found that in this respect, Magento is remarkably flexible. I wanted to move the search box and the account functions from inside the main container to the very top of the screen, where I thought they would be easier to use. This modification was as simple as cutting a small line of php responsible for calling the correct template block from inside the main container, and pasting it at the very top of the page.
The other great thing I found with Magento was the sheer number of features which I hadn’t found when researching the product; but which we later put to great use on the site. Some of these are third party developments, such as aheadWorks fantastic ajax autocomplete solution ‘Search Autocomplete and Suggest’ or ebizmart’s simple Protx Direct module. Others had been built into the system from the beginning, for example support for different themes based on user agent or several nifty features involving invoicing and account management.
Magento isn’t without its pitfalls however. Very simple tasks can often be a headache to achieve, and the almost complete lack of official documentation doesn’t help either. Luckily the active community behind the project maintain both a wiki and forums, which can answer most of the questions you need to ask about the application, even if the suggestions often have to resort to crude hacks to get the desired result, because the functionality lots of people are after simply isn’t included in vanilla Magento.
Overall, my experience of Magento was very positive, and both my client and I are very pleased with the website we’ve managed to create together.
Thanks for suggesting our Sagepay module (formerly ProTX) in this review, Magento is definitively the way to go for those looking for an OSS e-commerce suite, as you said, easy to setup, configure and extend.
Just been at the Magento events at Internet World in London and have to say its VERY impressive. Also the amount of performance enhances for large stores. We are just about to use SagePay too. They have just released an official book that you can get on Magento.
BUT The price of the enterprise version is… rediculous especially when they had someone from PHP talking about Zend Server with performance caching, replaying transactions, bug tracing full support for Zend Server and Zend Framework included for nearly the 10th of the price…
I’ve got to agree with you there James; I’d forgotten to mention that in my review. I agree that the price point of the Enterprise Edition is totally prohibitive to small businesses or individuals. However, I don’t think that Varien has ‘betrayed’ the OS philosophy (which I fully endorse), as many of the features found in the Enterprise Edition can also be added to vanilla Magento with extensions.
Hi, Ugh, I liked! So clear and positively.
i prefer the stock management options that OS commerce offers; there is a little more detail than magneto in this area.
i have also had some problems with the URL rewriting. The links within the layered navigation, along with the pagination links, and the grid settings (like products per page, sorting, and grid preferences) all point to the non-rewritten URLs. This not only creates a usability problem, it also presents a duplicate content issue (in regards to SEO) where the non-rewritten pages due to which the non-rewritten pages may be spidered and indexed in the search engines. This implies the site would have at least two URLs from the same page or something similar to it. Since the non-rewritten URLs are exposed it can create some strange SEO issues for the site.
you do not get this problem with Apache OFbiz, the system i am currently using and recommending.
what does everyone else think ?
Mark
Thanks Mark,
I completely know what you mean about the URL rewrites, I often come to a situation where I want a link from the top navigation to link to a static page or an external site. Whenever I set up a URL Rewrite Rule to do this it seems totally hit and miss as to whether it works or not. Has anyone else had a problem in this area?
also forgot to add, great site.
Mark
Nice writeup! But could you elaborate on the “pitfalls”? It’s those areas that we really want to know about.
Great site! I love the layered navigation for the “about us” section — How did you achieve that? Any pointers to how to get this done?
Matt, do you mean on the Outdoor Traders site? I’ll give you a tutorial on it if you want.