[Phpwm] magento

[Greg Jones]

Hiya,

I'm doing Magento development pretty much full-time at the moment and
it's pretty good once you get to grips with it.

There's an awful lot of abstraction, and there is no developer
documentation but it's pretty solid, really flexible in what you can
hook into and extend (there's a mechanism for extending any built-in
class, and/or you can listen for events that get fired pretty much
everywhere - you'll never need to change a 'core' file and be faced
with upgrade problems) with a boat-load of useful ecommerce
functionality.

With APC (and magento setup to use APC as it's cache backend - it's
Zend_Cache under the hood) then performance is pretty good - for
development, with none of the app caching turned on then things are
really, really slow as it's parsing and merging those many XML files
every time.

Theming difficult? There are a lot of files, every little bit of the
page will be it's own template file but the developer-mode tells you
which bit of the page is in which file, and it's all very
logical...just completely undocumented. There are also plenty of
3rd-party themes out there that even if not exactly what you're after,
can provide a useful starting point.

It's far, far from perfect, and I spend plenty of time cursing it, but
there is plenty that's good about it, and it does seem to be so much
better than anything else that's available.

Greg.

2009/12/14 David Goodwin <david at codepoets.co.uk>:
> j michaelson wrote :
>> My brother in law is making websites with magento and I remember
>> hearing some pretty bad things about it at the meal we had at
>> wagamamas. What exactly is wrong with magento and are there any
>> similar products that do a better job?
>> Thanks.
>>
>
> Random summary:
>
> 1) It's very slow
> 2) There are a lot of XML Files involved
> 3) The API is not necessarily complete - it appears to offer all the
> features you need, but then you may find they aren't completely
> implemented
> 4) There aren't many people out there who do Magento development
> 5) Theming is apparently difficult.
>
> I looked at Magento about 2-3 years ago; a lot may have chanced since
> then... but I've not heard many speak good about it.
>
> David.
> --
> David Goodwin
>
> [ david at codepoets dot co dot uk ]
> [ http://www.codepoets.co.uk       ]
>
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