Since we don’t have much experience with Magento, we are looking into the possibility of using Joomla to meet their desire to have quick updates and changes to multiple pages, and Magento for cart purposes.

Any thoughts or experience?

Where other websites require caching to meet overload demand, Magento needs it to just serve a page in 3 seconds under moderate load.

The grand secret is to offload as much as possible from Magento into various caching schemes so that it gets called upon as little as possible to assemble pages and serve out data. The best example of this is the LightSpeed caching module, which allows for hole punching changeable blocks into already assembled, preloaded and cached pages. In other words you are taking the dynamic pages from Magento, compiling them into cached static pages and only calling on Magento for what has changed from the customer’s view. By doing this, they can get even better performance than is deliverable by Magento’s Professional and Enterprise versions.

By using dedicated servers and caching, you can get some pretty good performance out of it and let it live up to its promise of being an upscale system. Basically not an e-Commerce system for people who want to run on shared hosting and who don’t have the ability to build, configure and maintain their own servers and have a lot of familiarity with php coding.

The Magento Community Version is based on a community that has about 70% of its user base trying shotgun methods of fixing things without really understanding what they really are doing and no support whatsoever from Varien. The Community version really is a gateway to get you to upgrade to at least the Professional Version, where you hope that you really get some support for what you paid for, but probably will find yourself paying yet more support fees for “suggestions”.

When it came to developing an ecommerce site for our business some 4-5 years ago, I did my research & went for zencart. It was great. I had never seen PHP before, but it was simple enough .. and I was able to make all the changes necessary to turn the site into something very different from original .. although ended up hacking the code to the point where it was not upgradable to the new version directly. And that was a mistake .. since I dropped further development .. and before I knew it .. the 1.2.6 zencart version I was using had jumped to 1.3.x .. and upgrading my site meant almost starting from scratch. This was an year ago .. so I thought I might as well go with a new platform.

That is when I started doing my research and came across Magento .. which did hit me like a rock in the face. First impression was WOW .. this is what I want! So in no time, I downloaded the framework & after some tweaking, fired it on the localserver & had it up & running. Now .. time to dive into the system so I could find out how to customize it. This is when the second rock hit me .. as I found myself in the same boat as many others. After hours, I was only able to make very few modifications .. wondering if the system is complex or if it is me who has turned into an old dog .. one that can’t learn new tricks. It was depressing seriously .. since development is my passion .. one thing I thought I was good at! With me, when I am looking at a framework, I want to get a grasp of it .. so I know what to do with it when making big changes, when required. Just changing CSS & having a new look does not qualify for customizing a framework, IMO. With Magento, I remember, I could not create a correlation between the changes I made with the code, to the front end. With development, you make changes, and they reflect .. which is what did not happen with Magento.

Now, the water is almost over my head, as my company needs the new website, & all that is on my shoulder, to choose the framework as well as implement it. I have still boiled down my choices to either Magento or Prestashop. So I asked one question from my fellow members .. what would you prefer .. a site packed with features on the cost of being a little slow .. OR, and before I could complete my sentence, they were like .. don’t want the features, the site has to be fast. And I thought .. there goes Magento. Although in all fairness, using YSlow for firefox apart from common sense observation, Magento sites are not as slow as I thought they would be. But then again, I have no knowledge of how they’re being hosted.

Anyhow, to my yawing readers, I am now at a crossroad. I love Magento, as it has everything that I need, as opposed to Prestashop, which neither looks as polished, nor does it have the features (product comparison, layered navigation, SEO features). You can get these features, but they come at a cost, and nearly don’t look as neat as Magento. Prestashop appeals to me with its apparent speed (e.g. entering product seems much faster & simpler .. Magento admin area is slow even on localhost!!). Prestashop design seems pretty straight forward, and the changes that you make instantly reflect on the front end, something .. “normal”. On the face of it, Prestashop seems promising as at least there is hope that it may have all the features someday, whereas the complexity of Magento isn’t going to get any less with time. But Prestashop team also seems to be working quite slow (e.g. ‘Product Comparison’ has been an upcoming feature for more than an year now & it still isn’t there). Quite honestly, I am still indecisive & need to decide fast. I don’t intend to make money out of Magento development, so creating a site that works for us is a possibility. But all the same, I don’t want to invest my time learning something that is going to be a pain later, IF i ever need to make some changes with our site.

In the end, I am at least convinced on one thing, regardless of what all those people who have mastered Magento may say .. and it is that Magento is definitely a very ill designed architecture, on purpose or otherwise. And my argument is based on the very fact that it is simply too complex and hard to learn, or stick with, for most people. This guy I knew, who was an engineer in Ford, told me once regarding engineering a design. He said that the job of hundred engineers is to come up with an engine design that is simple enough to be fixed by an ordinary mechanic. To me, that is what system architecture is all about, esp. when we’re talking about open source architecture.

haven’t really gotten a reason to change from virtuemart, plus all the complaints about magentos speed makes me give it a wide berth .

but i got a call from a client who wants me to customize his site from what ive read im in for a rough ride.
thanks for the insights.

The lack of decent, up-to-date documentation – you just have to look at the community forums to see the sheer amount of frustration this causes!