Magento Commerce first beta.
The first beta of Magento Commerce was released on August 31st. Varien, an Los Angeles ecommerce shop has been teasing the PHP world for months about this project and it's great to see it finally released. Despite the large number of open-source PHP CMSs, there has not been that many options for ecommerce. OsCommerce is the biggest but has a reputation for being difficult to work with.
The interesting thing about Magento is that Varien has been a long time user of OsCommerce. They apparently got sick of running into walls with OsCommerce and decided to create their own product. It's open-source as well, built on the Zend Framework and has a very rich feature set. I was really looking forward to this project's release because I feel like the fact that they are coming out of heavy real-world use of OsCommerce makes them well qualified for building a next-generation product. The use of Zend Framework increases my confidence because I think it is smart to build something like this on an established platform instead of building from scratch.
The Roadmap looks great and I'm impressed with it so far. The interface is slick and the feature set is already really far ahead of the CMS oriented carts I've used before. Advanced features like wishlists, upselling and cross-selling are all in there and easily managed through a nice modern UI.
There are a couple of weaknesses from an admin side. First is no RTE support, though I believe that is coming soon. Second is no auto-generation of various image sizes, something that years of Typo3 use has spoiled me on.
The first beta of Magento Commerce was released on August 31st. Varien, an Los Angeles ecommerce shop has been teasing the PHP world for months about this project and it's great to see it finally released. Despite the large number of open-source PHP CMSs, there has not been that many options for ecommerce. OsCommerce is the biggest but has a reputation for being difficult to work with.
The interesting thing about Magento is that Varien has been a long time user of OsCommerce. They apparently got sick of running into walls with OsCommerce and decided to create their own product. It's open-source as well, built on the Zend Framework and has a very rich feature set. I was really looking forward to this project's release because I feel like the fact that they are coming out of heavy real-world use of OsCommerce makes them well qualified for building a next-generation product. The use of Zend Framework increases my confidence because I think it is smart to build something like this on an established platform instead of building from scratch.
The Roadmap looks great and I'm impressed with it so far. The interface is slick and the feature set is already really far ahead of the CMS oriented carts I've used before. Advanced features like wishlists, upselling and cross-selling are all in there and easily managed through a nice modern UI.
There are a couple of weaknesses from an admin side. First is no RTE support, though I believe that is coming soon. Second is no auto-generation of various image sizes, something that years of Typo3 use has spoiled me on.
posted by John Nicholas at 10:00 AM
3 Comments:
That's great news, I was looking around for a reliable cart to build an e-commerce system. Thanks for the post
Well, Magento is freshly released to beta so they are discouraging production use for a while. But I'm hoping it will be usable real world quickly. Of course with ecommerce (ie money) you have to be more careful than usual.
When it comes to programming there are no walls. If you have the source you can make it do anything ... if you are any good.
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