I have been working with Magento for quite a while now. However I am just now about to launch my first official site with it. It brings some amazing features to the table and, in my experience, is the best open source shopping product out there. But that praise comes reluctantly. For a newcomer Magento is extremely painful to get up and running.
After working with other open source projects, Magento might seem like it was deliberately engineered to make your life hell.
In fact, perhaps the biggest issue facing Magento today must be the installation and the setup process. Once you are able to get Magento successfully installed, don’t celebrate just yet.
The vast expanse of baked-in features and slick UI comes at a price. Be prepared to configure your install for a few hours. As I finalized the site for launch I was thinking how great it would be to capture all of this so next go around I didn’t have to think about it. Well what do you know, someone already did it!
Too bad I didn’t find this fantastic article until after I was done. So if you are struggling to get your store up and running that will be an invaluable resource.
And I most certainly agree with the author, most of these setup hurdles could and should be avoided in future releases.
This shopping cart system clearly has a lot of potential and worth the headache of getting it going. Varian (the guys behind Magento) provide quite a bit of documentation and the community is providing some invaluable material as well. I would even say it is better built than much of the ‘enterprise’ software I work with.