Magento Open Source Ecommerce

I have recently come across a very promising ecommerce product called Magento. The current version is 1.14. At the time of writing this post, Magento is just over 1 year old. It is still a very young product and show’s great promise. It is designed using current PHP coding standards, and is based around the Zend PHP development framework. It also has a very clean user interface which makes it very nice to use.

The code and the user front end are separated from each other, this makes template development so much easier. Some of key areas still need development.

• Performance can be a problem, and a dedicated host with a PHP bytecode cache is ideal
• No support file based down-loadable products like software or music
• Poor support for bulk importing of products, if you have product set of several thousand products, It can take several hours to import data

I actually quite like the product and will be watching it mature. In fact when I get more time , I would like to contribute to it’s development. However as it is now, I would not recommended for a very busy or a site with a large product set.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/