41–50 of 55 posts
From the developer's perspective Magento is a maze of spagetti nightmare. The cost to maintain it, adding custom extensions and keep it up and running as a whole is way, way more than using off the shelf SaaS ecommerce solution.
Anyone have a cache? EDIT : here it is. No infringement intended. Magento has been in decline since Varien sold to eBay. Magento Community Edition is dead. Magento Go is a failure surpassed by Shopify. Magento CE releases have dried up. So now what? Magento 2.0 sounds promising. However, Magento 2.0 is lead by developers-only. No marketeers are involved to communicate merchant needs. I have tested Magento 2.0 dev60 a…
The problem with Magento, like so many other OSS eCommerce platforms, is that of extensibility (or lack thereof), and the ensuing technical debt. We've been making eCommerce solutions (not just sites - CRM, warehouse management, analytics, lots and lots of marketing tools) for nearly a decade now. We started out with OsC, played with Magento, and saw, 8 years ago, that the strategy of these platforms was, well, broke…
Anyone have a cache? EDIT : here it is. No infringement intended. Magento has been in decline since Varien sold to eBay. Magento Community Edition is dead. Magento Go is a failure surpassed by Shopify. Magento CE releases have dried up. So now what? Magento 2.0 sounds promising. However, Magento 2.0 is lead by developers-only. No marketeers are involved to communicate merchant needs. I have tested Magento 2.0 dev60 a…
I agree 100% . The question is on what plateform and language should it be written (to be successfull) ?
The developer hostility in this is astounding.
"This is how developers keep themselves employed: by regularly clusterfucking your code."
Ummm, no. This is what happens when feature requirements are poorly communicated over a long period of time, combined with implementing every half baked or ill advised feature asked for by the marketing team. You know, stuff like "automated SEO using artificial intelligence".
I have worked on Magento, and agree that it is painful and convoluted, but it's a bit hard to believe that every single dev that has contributed to it was either stupid and/or malicious. Hopefully, moving to a community driven approach on 2.0 will actually clean up some of the technical debt and make the product more reliable, although it's more likely that it's just going to result in future feature adds coming from more numerous stakeholders with conflicting visions.
Hopefully the Magento management can manage all that input and stay focused. What they absolutely need to ignore is misguided and obviously clueless (or even malicious) feedback like this article.
Magento has been poor software since Varien started trying to monetize. It has always been slower than necessary, a huge resource hog, and relatively complex to configure. The real problem is that there is nothing better out there. Magento is the Drupal of the eCommerce world - relatively prominent, but almost universally reviled by developers and not all that easy to use for users. It's the worst of many worlds. It'…
This a thousand times.
I've used both and as a developer it was incredibly painful to customize either for any specific feature or function. The first time I upgraded Magento, it completely broke the client's site. A nice Sunday afternoon was spent hacking together plugins to fix what the update broke.
Both are horrible to work with and I shudder anytime someone suggests it to me for their ecommerce platform. You'd be better just hiring a .Net developer and have them build you something from scratch.
Anyone have a cache? EDIT : here it is. No infringement intended. Magento has been in decline since Varien sold to eBay. Magento Community Edition is dead. Magento Go is a failure surpassed by Shopify. Magento CE releases have dried up. So now what? Magento 2.0 sounds promising. However, Magento 2.0 is lead by developers-only. No marketeers are involved to communicate merchant needs. I have tested Magento 2.0 dev60 a…
The problem with Magento, like so many other OSS eCommerce platforms, is that of extensibility (or lack thereof), and the ensuing technical debt. We've been making eCommerce solutions (not just sites - CRM, warehouse management, analytics, lots and lots of marketing tools) for nearly a decade now. We started out with OsC, played with Magento, and saw, 8 years ago, that the strategy of these platforms was, well, broke…
Anyone have a cache? EDIT : here it is. No infringement intended. Magento has been in decline since Varien sold to eBay. Magento Community Edition is dead. Magento Go is a failure surpassed by Shopify. Magento CE releases have dried up. So now what? Magento 2.0 sounds promising. However, Magento 2.0 is lead by developers-only. No marketeers are involved to communicate merchant needs. I have tested Magento 2.0 dev60 a…
The problem with Magento, like so many other OSS eCommerce platforms, is that of extensibility (or lack thereof), and the ensuing technical debt. We've been making eCommerce solutions (not just sites - CRM, warehouse management, analytics, lots and lots of marketing tools) for nearly a decade now. We started out with OsC, played with Magento, and saw, 8 years ago, that the strategy of these platforms was, well, broke…
There is a learning curve, made steep by the esoteric MVC approach and initial lack of documentation. However, there is now a wealth of material available for learning and reference. Magento is opinionated as a framework and in its domain modeling. You mention your homegrown application; how easy is it for developers to spin up on your application, and how well would it satisfy & improve things as a drop-in app replacement for the hundreds of thousands of Magento instances out there?
"...it's not for the end user, as the front-end experience is so-so at best, and again, hard to customise without screwing up upgradability..."
Frontend experience - I'd say mostly okay, but I'll not fight you on "so-so at best". However for customizations, upgradability and obedience to DRY are the underpinning of the theming architecture. Again, lack of documentation was an issue at first (I remember duplicating the default themes for customization purposes when I first started out), but there is ample documentation now. I am most disappointed with the power given to templates, and I think this is the only legitimate gripe.
"The other side of this is that a magento install will run a magento site - not ten, not two on different databases, and no mix-and-match of either, meaning that you end up with a whole bunch of code-bases, many of which differ, even if you're a shop exclusively running magento for your N clients."
If this is an issue, you're doing it wrong. I would like to know more about how Magento cannot be a library for you to manage in VCS for your clients. There are SaaS offerings based on Magento, but at the point of building a SaaS you are beyond the edge of the intent/target of the problems which Magento is built to solve.
"...it's definitely not for the merchant, as it's featureless, barren..."
/me looks at all the routes in the admin and at the Connect marketplace...
"[it's] slow, and ultimately expensive to run"
Would like to know your numbers for this. Scalability is a concern, as Magento vertical and horizontal scaling are both costly.
From the developer's perspective Magento is a maze of spagetti nightmare. The cost to maintain it, adding custom extensions and keep it up and running as a whole is way, way more than using off the shelf SaaS ecommerce solution.
Absolutely the worst maze of spaghetti files. To get anything done on one page you had to edit a few different deeply nested partial files. I hated working on it.
Magento's largest problem is that most people who look at it assume it is like Wordpress. Download, click install, change the theme somewhat and get started. Very unlike Wordpress this is hard. So you either shell out cash to outside developers (a healthy enough marketplace exists) or pay the price in learning how to program it yourself. Enough decent materials on how to do this exist but it is definitely not aimed a…