Magento Notes – Part 1: What is Magento?

Posted 12 months ago at 06:35. 0 comments

Hi and welcome to the first part of our ongoing, independent Magento documentation effort, Magento Notes!

In this series, I’m going to keep track about my progress and findings about Magento. As some of you might know, Magento is famous for many things, but not for its beginner-friendliness. There’s a lot of concepts and tricks to be learned, and it can be quite frustrating in the beginning. It’s a fun and challenging experience, but the wealth of built-in functionality and lack of official documentation for the trickier parts makes working with it quite an adventure sometimes. So I’m writing development notes and tricks down here so I won’t forget them.

So, back to topic. What is Magento?

• It’s a feature-rich, extensible, modern ecommerce software
• It supports most, if not all techniques and payment gateways that are “hot” in ecommerce through plugins (extensions)
• At the time of this writing, over 1000 extensions are available over Magento Connect
• It’s PHP and MySQL based
• It has a crafty designed, object-oriented MVC implementation
• It uses the Zend Framework and many of it’s coding conventions
• There are not much limits to what you can do with it
• Alas, this rich feature set comes with a price: complexity.

Magento is used by several major retailers, and won several awards (such as the Bossie Award). It’s being actively developed, and it’s good base to built shops upon.

Well, in case you didn’t notice, I quite like this system. With all the rambling out of the way, let’s get productive. The next post is about installing a development environment for this beast.