Magento seems to be the rising star Open Source of shopping carts. I'm excited about it because :
- Although it is PHP (I'm not a fan), it uses the Zend Framework, which at least has learnt from Rails. ie it has MVC
- Zend and Adobe have been talking, and Zend now includes AMF support, which Flex can consume with greater speed (about 25%), less bandwidth than XML ( about 35%) and server load was reduced to 4% of the XML equivalent in this test. There is even an Open Source project Matsiya to integrate Flex and Magento.
- It aims to be the main platform for up to very large sites. That means it will cope with all sorts of wacky promotional rules and product types
- It has a nice looking UI that I would be proud to demonstrate to shop owner/operators, and I'm printing over 100 pages of nice looking user manual.
- It aims to provide full API access to its functionality. This means easy integration with Flex, Rails and those scripts you sometimes have to write for some bizarre requirement, or even quite sensible requirements that the vendor has overlooked.
- It has basic CMS ability, so for sites that consist of shop + simple static content (surely a large percentage of the market) it should be possible to develop a whole site in Magento.
- I'm hoping I can treat it like a black box, not needing to get into the source code - just providing templates, CSS and Flex SWFs and Ruby scripts if necessary.
There is only one book for Magento (others are in the works they say) that is expensive and doesn't have good reviews, so I went to print out the User Guide, but it wasn't in PDF form, so I've converted it, with the Designers guide, thanks to OS Xs wonderful PDF manipulation features in Preview and you can get them here:
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