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.

Zend Framework Released.

There's been a lot of interest in php frameworks recently and now Zend, the guys who actually maintain php have released their take, Zend Framework.

There are a few different approaches to frameworks but they can be divided into two camps. First are full frameworks like symfony or CakePHP. These have also been called 'opinionated' in that they have strong expectations for what code goes where and encourage (force?) you to work in a specific way. I've started using Cake lately on our non-cms projects and am pretty happy with that approach. The dogmatic frameworks are especially good on a project where you have to outsource development since you know where everything will end up.

Zend's framework is more in the second camp. These frameworks, another being CodeIgniter, are more a set of classes that take care of various features in a standard way that you mix and match as needed. These can be faster and more flexible. I actually plan on using some of these Zend classes within our CMS sites since they will be easier to work into other systems. I especially think they will be a good fit on flash remoting driven projects.