Magento 1.7.0.1

Good international support: Magento handles language translation internally, and there are a lot of language packs available. It can also deal with multiple currencies, purchasing and shipping for many countries.

We've been trying to have Magento Enterprise running for almost a year, with expensive paid support from both Magento itself and a consulting company.
The outcome is : this thing is built with flexibility in mind, but that's it. Nothing more.
Sure, Magento can adapt to any kind of business, but this come at a cost : performances. With very very high end servers, don't expect any catalog change to take please in less then 4 seconds. For category change (move one product from one category to another), count ... 20 seconds ! Stock updates are around 5 seconds ...

If you're looking just for another easy going shop, like thousands around, Magento definitely won't be for you. But I believe the turnkey for success is to be unique on the very competitive e-market.

Magento gives you flexibility you could just dream about. It can be shaped in so many ways, that the only your own imagination (or skills) can stops you. All you need is take a while and understand the structure. If you really understand it and will follow the idea, even after thorough modifications you will still be able to upgrade to the next version in matter just hours. The core is nicely separated from the add-ons.

I agree, the hardware requirements make the system reasonably choice only if you can afford a dedicated hosting but don't expect you will get everything for nothing. You have to have a budget to run really good e-commerce.

I strongly recommend Magento for developers with somewhat higher ambitions then PrestaShop or osCommerce. If you in hurry to develop another insipid shop, leave it.

For a recent web development class, I downloaded Magento and tried to install it, repeatedly. Many in my class did as well. When we got to the installation in localhost, Apache shut down the whole she-bang. I tried and retried to get magento to work. In the end, my instructor led me in the direction of oscommerce instead. I'm wondering if Magento works better on some configurations than others. I was really looking forward to trying it out. :/

Slow, slow, slow, slower, slowest, magento.... -.-

Ok, first to the good parts:
It is really flexible, and you have a lot of configuration options out-of-the-box wich other systems don't have, for instance, it is really easy to create multiple attribute sets for different products.
Templating is not really straight-forward, because there are several directories that you have to consider (layout-dir contains xml files that put together different template-source-files, design-dir contains the template-files wich are written in plain php, in my opinion that is cool, because you don't have all the issues you have with crap like smartie in prestashop where you always have to delete the cache files, even if you have disabled smarty-caching etc., and finally the skin-directory that contains the css files), so it is fairly complex if you don't know the logical organisation of those structure, Joomla (i know, it is not an ecommerce system, but template is template) does a better job by far, capsulating all the template files into one, clean directory, where you can overwrite also core-module templates without having to touch the core-files. Another example of better templating WOULD BE Prestashop (only to mention an ecommerce platform), except that it uses smarty, wich is not smart at all (some may disagree, but it is really ugly stuff), in Prestashop you also have a single directory containing all the files without having to mess with 100000 xml files and for each and every modification change to one of the oder dirs....
But, once you get it, it is fairly logical.

Now to the real bad-part:
- performance -
It is slow, really slow, slower than growing grass, all other systems i saw until that moment were faster, every single one of them is at least twice as fast.
Even after performance optimizations we did (minifying js, installed apc as opcode cache and memcached as db-cache (configured it via local.xml), obviously turned on all caching options in magento, it is still way too slow in my opinion.
So, for future projects i would rather stick to Prestashop...

I like working on Magento community versions, after reading the comments i think people don't like it much, but magento has its own beauty.
I upgraded 1.4.1 version (60,000 sku's and 3000 customers with multistore website).
I love to work on magento.

It can be slow, but with the right tweaks you can get it to be faster.

The problem is when devolping your template you need to pay attention to what your adding.. (external js, images, video's etc..) your load times will suffer.

I agree that there is a lot that can be fixed with Magento. However, it has been steadily getting better over the years and the same could be assumed to continue in the future. It's still less than 5 years old and has made great progress since it's initial launch. I myself will continue using it. Those that complain that its too complicated or difficult need to have a little patience and study up. No pain, no gain!

i instaled magento, and here is my opinions and experiences with it:
I instaled it on realy REALY good hosting, and it was realy slow (cache was enabled so...it wasnt my server)
Just after i added categories of products, i get message from my hosting that something is wrong with my database BECAUSE IT HAS 950 tables in it.. so... late that night i loged to see my database without ANY product in it, and database was 45mb. its bigger than database of my portal that has 1350 articles, 150 blogs and so on... OKAY, next, every template that is normal, you have to pay..and thats ok, but, when you try to add just flash logo, you have to change about 7 files and their codes to do that. So i added my logo, WITHOUT ANY SUPPORT, there is no support for anything you want on their forums, just bunch of guys that are selling their scripts, extensions or templates to you. AND.. if you want to change blocks, or add blocks, or something special, like banner in the bottom of the site, you have to work ALL DAY to do it, and I AM A REALY GOOD CODER.. REALY GOOD!. so.. there is lots of simpler scripts for ecommerce than magento.. and TAKE A LOOK AT MAGENTO SAMPLE DATABASE FROM THEIR SITE http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/_media/doc/magento---sample_database_diagram.png?cache=cache .... sooo.. best wishes for you all, and when i say best wishes i dont wish you magento :) realy :)

The main problem with Magento is I don't really think there is a need for such a thing. It tries to be a solution to all problems but what you get is a highly abstract over engineered system which is a pain to work with. In theory it sounds great, it can do X/Y/Z, fully extensible, customisable, OO code, etc etc. The reality is its a huge pain to do even simple things. For example the templating system is the worst templating system I have ever seen. It's complex, convoluted and poorly documented.

If you want a simple online shop use OpenCart, its great for simple shops with small customisations. Which really takes care of 70% of the online shops out there. If you want something complex you are better off building your own system, it will probably be quicker!

On a recommendation we implemented a new store using Magento (we had been using Zen Cart previously). The experience has been mixed results. Installation is highly recommended on a dedicated server vs. shared hosting. It works on shared hosting (as we have set up), but not without hiccups (i.e. having to refresh the page several times every time you log into the control panel). Presentation and layout is reasonable to work with. Shopping cart and processing orders has taken much time to set up. Ideally as an end user and moderate programmer I am not totally hooked to stay with Magento with a shared hosting limitation. I believe having a dedicated server with Magento makes for a very good CMS experience.

I think that the Magento coding practices are a joke. The argument of it's endorsers is that it is extensible and modular. OK, great but what good is that when the code base is so convoluted and poorly documented that nobody wants to touch it?

What does Magento do that Opencart doesn't? Besides cause headaches.

I suggest that you stay away from Magento unless you have an endless development budget and if thats the case, just write your own proprietary software.

It is just developed to make a lot of money with the support. They made it unnecessarily difficult (even the most basic stuff). The source is open, but divided in 10 million files.

Excellent Open Source SMS - Manento. I recommend that professionals who want to improve ...

I worked on a very strong Magento projet during 2 years.

What I can say about it:
- it is very buggy, and complex
> true, but fixble
- it is slow
> you just do not know how to cook it
- it takes hours to change any simple thing
> are you real work with it 2 years, if true try some other
- it is impossible to have updates working
> I update magento in 3 hours (~10000 skus)

The most important thing to know about Magento is that they don t do true OOP, they defined their own programming standards making simple things very hard to understand.
> They very similar to Zend framework

Take indexing / search module, for example, is a nightmare to understand and to override.

I will never recommend Magento again.


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I recommend magento to people who want make money on e-commerce. But it realy hard to find good programmers for it.