Magento - Rebirth of the Shopping Cart!
A few years back I started getting lots of jobs from clients who were looking to jump in to the world of e-commerce. At the time, I wasn’t too familiar with the available shopping cart platforms. So like any good web developer entering new territory, I dove into a sea of google searches. From this research, I found that the two obvious favorites in the open source web community were (and still are) osCommerce and ZenCart. After much more reading, I chose to started using ZenCart whenever possible on all of my e-commerce sites (osCommerce’s lack of a template system was the main factor in the decision).
Fast forward a few years, and my initial wonder with ecommerce development has long since faded. I’ve come to despise almost every platform I have worked with. As a developer, you either have to deal with a shopping cart with horrible CMS functionality, or a great CMS with limiting and time consuming shopping cart module setups.
Not to long ago, I heard mention in a forum of some new shopping cart platform called Magento. I headed over to their site, checked out the demo, then wiped the drool off of my chin. I was impressed beyond belief. The Magento admin section was extremely intuitive and powerful. I felt right at home as if I had been using it for months. It was nothing like my first time with ZenCart ( a client of mine put it best, “what the hell do I do with this?” ). Managing your products is a breeze with a very nice interface, obviously created by some experienced designers.
By far, the most impressive thing about Magento is its CMS capabilites. You can add new pages, even custom front pages (without special override modules/functions), just as easily as you can add new products. Magento truely is the best of both worlds : Capable CMS and powerful shopping cart.
Head over to Magento and give the demo a try… you wont be disappointed