and when some developers do their hard work and fixed them by themselves, add some new module they developed.

but when the next version is out, the customized modules they developed for old version, just simply don’t works. they change core class code whatever they want and no backward compatibility at all.

Our company has been setting up Magento for sometime and unfortunately some of the outside services we engaged ended up costing us quite a bit for code that is useless. I am wondering is you can recommend any company to begin a long time partnership to grow with our needs. ThanksAndrew

You have to understand that the “finely grained” structure is one of the things that enable loose coupling within Magento’s components. Loose coupling is one of the key aspects in a well-architectured system, and it saves you from a lot of trouble later on. If you disagree, start unit-testing components or replacing components at will in a tightly coupled system and post your experiences here.

It feels wrong to blame Magento as an application if it’s your own skills that are lacking. Magento is a complex, powerful app with a lot of potential for tweaking. If you wanna learn how to use it properly, start studying about architecture in web apps and following those principles in your own code too. Can’t go wrong with PoEAA by Martin Fowler for example.

But now my manager wants me to learn Magento.. I have been busy for one month now, and I believe I want to die.

Deadline was 22nd of April, which is tomorrow. I figured it would take me less than a week to configure and customize.

I estimated it will take me another 4 months. Do not, I repeat, do not use this “open source shop”. It will lead you into an infinite depression.

Do you think it is a good idea or i should look for some simple cart solution than magento?

after working with oscommerce for years and hitting brick walls of limitation, i spent a few days getting to know magento.. the reason it runs so slow for most is that they have a lot of things left in the database by default, magento is a bulky bunch of code, but you can eliminate things you wont use

it’s really an amazing ecommerce script, though, especially for free. most small to medium ecommerce will be fine with most out of the box php scripts (oscommerce, creloaded, zencart, etc) but if someone comes to you and says ‘i want different groups of categories to have entirely different navigation, i want product pages to only have one column.. that is if they are simple products, if they are entire engines or transmission parts i want a column on the right explaining terms im probably going to use in them, oh and the home page needs to be one column, but i want the cms pages to be one column with a left nav that isn’t like any of the categories, and a few custom callouts on certain pages (controlled by xml).. i don’t even know if this would be possible in oscommerce?

but in magento as long as you are using the difficult and seemingly assbackwards xml layouts, paired with calling html blocks, updatable per category, per layout, per whatever you want, you can really do anything and everything per page, or per layout

it’s really hard to explain here, but if you really still feel this way about magento, i /really/ would not mind explaining in what cases it is good for, and that it really doesn’t fully suck for everything, and that it completely destroys the ‘other’ ecommerce scripts in a click of a button, that is if you need it to.

cheers!

I have used TurnkeyWebTools.com’s SunShop for years until one day a client suggested Magento to me since she didn’t want to pay for SunShop.

I opened it up, and tried just modifying some of the code, and had one of my designers try to modify the look of the cart and she was pulling her hair out!

This is probably one of the worst shopping carts I’ve ever come across in my 10 years of building e-commerce websites!