CMS Development – Magento and eCommerce
Choosing the right eCommerce CMS development platform isn’t as easy as asking ‘What’s the best program?’ because what’s best for one business can have little to do with what’s best for another. When we look at Magento, however, we see not only an eCommerce CMS development platform that offers a lot of what businesses need out-of-the-box, but also has a large community of developers constantly refining its functionality.
Implementing an eCommerce CMS, Magento or otherwise, is no small feat. Careful attention must be paid to why one particular CMS is being chosen over another and that the basics of eCommerce CMS implementation, such as content definitions, technical and human resource capabilities and future developments, have been defined.
Our work with Magento has revealed an eCommerce CMS with extensive out-of-the-box capabilities to suit a wide range of businesses and applications. This includes management of gift cards, vouchers, store credit, packing slips and customisable filters for the drill-down search feature all good eCommerce websites require. It also deftly handles PayPal, Google Checkout and Global Tax Management, while the enterprise-level support adds another service layer for both customers and developers.
Beyond the excellent shopping cart functions, Magento also offers subscriber and CRM email functionality together with high levels of integrated data encryption and other security measures.
eCommerce CMS development almost always requires customisation. With Magento, however, the large and active community of developers have already created, and made available, almost any additional feature you can imagine. With the price of these additions ranging from free to just a few dollars, the Magento eCommerce CMS is a very attractive and well-supported development option. When a problem does arise, and it’s rare that one won’t at some point, the Zend Framework at Magento’s core makes finding and correcting code issues easy.
Magento is a terrific CMS option, both in terms of standard functionality and sourcing additional features, and should be considered as a potential solution by any business seeking a world-class CMS.
4 Comments
17th August 2010
I agree Magento is an awesome platform, however all those features tend to give the software a lot of bloat. Even with full page caching and separating the database / web server layers it still performs terribly under heavy load.
This issue seems to be well known in the community as well.. Do you know if there is any difference between the community and enterprise edition in this regard? Any tips on Magento configuration?
17th August 2010
Good read Jimmy, from a front end dev point of view what’s it like to skin? For less complex (or smaller budget options) there’s also the wordpress e-commerce plugin – http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/
18th August 2010
Unfortunately you’re right Craig, Magento can perform poorly. However, I’d still choose a stable, well supported, feature-rich platform over a skinny alternative that will inevitably require hacks or upgrades – especially given processing power and memory is so affordable these days.
If you/your client are after an “enterprise grade” solution, Zend Server will surely help with the bloat. Zend Server’s full page caching (as opposed to Zend Framework/Magento full page caching) is a godsend. You can set up URLs that are cached and served without even hitting the PHP Stack – effectively a built-in reverse proxy. I haven’t tried this with Magento yet, but they are in cahoots, so I’d hope the Magento session management supports this feature.
For the “less enterprise” solution, we’ve had great results using XCache. I’d like to paste in a impressive chart of CPU levels halving, but that wasn’t really the case; the sites in question are noticeably more responsive though, and no more 3am SMS alerts.
You could also look for Magento optimised hosting partners and make it their problem.
As for enterprise vs community edition, I assume the enterprise version would have even more bloat given the extra feature set. Also, it would be pretty cruel if Magento only optimised the enterprise version.
A couple of tips from my experience:
- Make sure your servers have multi-core CPUs
- Set all Index Management to Manual Update, not Update On Save
- Convince yourself you can’t live without Zend Server.
18th August 2010
Hey Aonghus (How are ya…?)
For your first Magento skinning experience, double your budget and expect pain… or hire a professional (IE
). You can’t really get away with good design, HTML and CSS skills. You also need a solid understanding of OOD, XML, Zend Framework, Magento and a astrophysics degree. Once you’ve launched a couple of sites though, you can start to see that there are real benefits to the Magento skinning setup. You can always just purchase and hack at a existing template though. I don’t think our design team would allow that option, thankfully.