A Quick Look At Magento As An eCommerce Solution

I’ve been using Magento for a few weeks now and let’s just say it wasn’t an easy journey. I don’t want that to put you off though, because I approached it the wrong way.

I had a quick skim over the Magento For Designers Series on NetTuts+. (Not all parts had been posted when I started reading them), I read up to chapter 4. If you’ve read them then you can imagine my confusion when parts weren’t working and I couldn’t get the shop to show what I wanted.

Magento, at it’s core is quite hard to get the hang of at first. Just setting it up locally can be tricky for someone who isn’t at all familiar with eCommerce solutions such as me. I managed to get there in the end though.

The Back-End Interface

The back end interface is something that took me by surprise at first. The main things that I didn’t like straight of the bat were the navigational links. Nine links, almost each with at least 5 – 10 sub-links. On top of that, there is also another layer of links that appear from time to time. Yes, three levels worth!

Apart from the navigation the back-end admin panel is rather nice once you get the hang of it. It’s very clear what each page does, (that’s if you know a bit about eCommerce or just Commerce in general), and the design isn’t half bad either, although it’s no WordPress. There are also some warning dialog boxes which come up exactly where and when you need them, very helpful, especially on a live site.

The Products and Categories

The main things I’m going to go over are the Products and Categories. Adding products can be a nightmare at first, there must be at least 30+ to 50+ options on each new item and just getting the basic info put in can be a bit of bother. However, there is and upside, all of these options give you incredibly freeing functionality over how your store and products in general are run and displayed.

The Categories. The categories are, in a way, the same as the products; They can be hard to set up when you’re new to it all but in the end the amount of options are incredibly useful. The problem that plagues the categories interface is a simple problem, which isn’t that hard to fix, the copy. The copy really does bring that old feeling of:

It’s a problem that brings Magento down to a level it doesn’t need to go. I would like to see and interface that didn’t ask me for a URL Key or which CMS Block to add a new product to.

The Code

The code is surprising easy to understand. It reminds me of WordPress. As with WordPress you would just type the name of a PHP Function to get what you wanted here it’s just a matter of:

[sourececode language="php"]
getChildHtml(‘topMenu’) ?>
[/sourcecode]

The above code would get the list of categories that you’ve set up for the shop from the back-end. Please remember that they’ll only show up if you enable it with the back-end options.

The XML Side of Things

The XML is something you’ll have difficulty with. At first they seem a little bit pointless but as time goes on you’ll notice that quite a lot, if not all the functionality of you’re site is done through these. There’s a vast amount of XML files that you can use, ranging from the basic page template to the code for the wish list and even Google Checkout. I won’t pretend I know what the more advanced files are for because I honestly have no clue

If you’re a developer then I would suggest going through a few tutorials which teach the basics of theming for Magento, like the Magento For Designers Series on NetTuts+. Then just go for it and dive straight it. I found it easiest to find out what each file, (that I actually needed of course), did, then I would strip away the the few I didn’t need one by one, until I had my own basic Magento version of Starkers for WordPress.

The Conclusion and My Final Thoughts

Although this has obviously been a short post compared to others I hope you either now have a reason to use Magento or have decided to go somewhere else. I know that this review seems a touch negative in most places but when using Magento the benefits are obvious. You get a free piece of incredibly powerful eCommerce software. I hope that by showing you the things I disliked then you can decided on whether these things can be put up with, because to me, Magento is what I’ll be using for the future.