Magento is the ecommerce solution that takes time to master! It comes in two flavors; Enterprise and Community.
Enterprise is the fully supported, commercially licensed version of the app with prices starting at $11,125/yr (as of 2nd May 2010).
Community is the version available for no cost to the general market. Naturally your only source of support “out of the box” are the Magento forums and a few third party sites (feel free to tell us about your Magento site in the comments). There are quite a few specialist Magento developers out there, so if you need more help there’s always someone available for the right price.
For the rest of this post we’ll be talking about the Magento Community version.
Magento Community – Should I use it?
Web Developers
Magento is a beast worth taming. You’ll be frustrated, angry and annoyed with parts of the system whilst working on it but keep going. The more time you spend with it, the more understanding of how solid and powerful an application it is. You’ll have a “eureka” moment whilst working on it which will change your attitude towards the app. If you’ve got an “intermediate” web development skillset you shouldn’t have too many issues setting up the vanilla (default configuration) version of Magento. The majority of issues come about due to file permissions on the server or the caching engine of Magento (try to fix something and you don’t see the results). We usually disable the caching on our development server, and only fully enable it once live.
Store Owners
Magento offers a lot of features in terms of reporting and the management of products and stock. It is also one of the most complicated to get used to due to the sheer number of options and features available (and will most likely need you to spend some money on a web developer). If you’re looking for a fully fledged store that is well rounded and secure (if maintained properly) then Magento is an excellent option and worth the additional time to understand as well as the possible extra cost for development. If you have no web development experience (be it yourself or the team) then you’ll need a web developer to assist you with installing and configuring the installation. To keep costs low you could purchase a pre-built Magento theme/style from places such as Template Monster (recommended) and ThemeForest.
For those of you looking for something a little less intensive, utilizing a managed service such as Do Your Own Site and aShop (has both retail and wholesale functionality) is definitely worth looking at.
Handy Hints
Here’s a list of resources that we’ve utilized whilst working on the development and customization of a Magento 1.4.0.1 (and older) installation. Please feel free to ask any questions if you need a little help with anything listed below.
- Why aren’t my product categories being listed in the menu?
http://www.aschroder.com/2009/03/top-3-solutions-when-your-magento-categories-are-not-displaying/ - Adding a left hand menu
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/how_to_create_a_vertical_left_hand_menu - Add products to the homepage
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/how_to/add_featured_products_to_home_page - Adding Static Blocks
http://devzone.pratthost.com/2008/09/30/magento-add-static-block-to-cms-page/ - Creating Dynamic Category Landing Pages
http://magentoexpert.co.uk/2009/05/23/tips-for-creating-dynamic-category-landing-pages/ - Disable the Compare Function
http://www.aschroder.com/2009/07/removing-the-compare-function-in-magento-the-easy-way/ - Forcing the User to Login to access the store
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/7589/P15/#t141148 - Reference an image from your skin/theme in the Magento app folder
http://snipplr.com/view/22394/magento-get-skin-url/ - Redirect the user to a specific page when they login
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/26352/ - Changing the logo in the system emails
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/40257/ - Flushing the test order and user records
http://inchoo.net/ecommerce/magento/delete-test-orders-in-magento/ - Migrating Magento to a new server
http://www.richardcastera.com/2009/06/30/migrating-magento-to-another-server/ - Magento migration issues:
- app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Mysql4/Config.php on line 92
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/23276/P15/#t116807 - BTREE errors
http://www.eliasinteractive.com/blog/magento-database-import-error-using-btree-key-fk_attribute_varchar_entity-entity_id-key-fk_catalo-at-line-9
- app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Mysql4/Config.php on line 92
- Changing the base url in the database
http://blog.chandanweb.com/magento/how-to-change-base-url-in-magento
). The application will act a problem solver for the community whilst utilising different platforms with a fun, intuitive interface. The monkey himself is currently stock but we’re getting Brian THE illustrator to produce an uber monkey shortly. Basic launch March 2010.
