I can't resists tossing in my 2 cents. I don't really like talking bad about a product but I can't condone this thing in any form. I hope someone finds this useful.
I recently completed a Magento build for a 10m year storefront of which I was the sole developer. This was my first Magento build but I've worked with just about everything, Drupal, Alfresco, Wordpress, OpenCart, osCommerce, NodeJS, some python frameworks and most of the php mvcs, bla bla
The build included a custom theme, many custom extension and lives in a multi-server environment in the AWS cloud. (Varnish, Redis, Nginx, PHP-FPM, RDS-MySQL)
First lets start with the front end:
Open: app/design/frontend/base/default/template/catalog/product/price.phtml
Vomit, Close file, Go watch a horror movie to clear your mind.
Ok so thats an extreme example of a really poor view but its a perfect example of why this is so unapproachable. The templates are filled with horribly nested, overly complex, unnecessarily verbose html nightmares. If you think this is ok then you have no business anywhere near the front-end. Most front-end devs have moved on to SPA apps, Angular, Ember and the like which are lightyears ahead of this stuff. Spa is where its at so to say, "we now have jQuery" is a bit of a joke.
The front-end is a freak show by modern comparison, go see for yourself.
The Backend:
Does anyone like XML, masochists aside?
“XML is a classic political compromise: it balances the needs of man and machine by being equally unreadable to both.” – Matthew Might
EAV Schema = Nice idea but not practical
Much of the backend issues are already listed in the other comments. To keep this short, I'll move on.
Admin Features:
The Import/Export is a failure (yes use Magmi). That magento can not consume its own export without modification is mind numbing. You will end up writing your own scripts at some point, promise.
Theres so much more I could list but I simply don't have the time. But I'll leave you with this.
Magento Go was killed off for a reason.
Few More Thoughts:
I see too many developers in love with the complexity they create. That someone can, with little experience, successfully build something with a tool is a complement to it's design, not a flaw. That someone must consume an entirely new, unintuitive way of reinventing the wheel is a flaw of which Rub Goldberg would be proud.
The wordpress developer vs magento developer argument is nonsense. Pythonistas have the right idea:
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
I can't resists tossing in my 2 cents. I don't really like talking bad about a product but I can't condone this thing in any form. I hope someone finds this useful.
I recently completed a Magento build for a 10m year storefront of which I was the sole developer. This was my first Magento build but I've worked with just about everything, Drupal, Alfresco, Wordpress, OpenCart, osCommerce, NodeJS, some python frameworks and most of the php mvcs, bla bla
The build included a custom theme, many custom extension and lives in a multi-server environment in the AWS cloud. (Varnish, Redis, Nginx, PHP-FPM, RDS-MySQL)
First lets start with the front end:
Open: app/design/frontend/base/default/template/catalog/product/price.phtml
Vomit, Close file, Go watch a horror movie to clear your mind.
Ok so thats an extreme example of a really poor view but its a perfect example of why this is so unapproachable. The templates are filled with horribly nested, overly complex, unnecessarily verbose html nightmares. If you think this is ok then you have no business anywhere near the front-end. Most front-end devs have moved on to SPA apps, Angular, Ember and the like which are lightyears ahead of this stuff. Spa is where its at so to say, "we now have jQuery" is a bit of a joke.
The front-end is a freak show by modern comparison, go see for yourself.
The Backend:
Does anyone like XML, masochists aside?
“XML is a classic political compromise: it balances the needs of man and machine by being equally unreadable to both.” – Matthew Might
EAV Schema = Nice idea but not practical
Much of the backend issues are already listed in the other comments. To keep this short, I'll move on.
Admin Features:
The Import/Export is a failure (yes use Magmi). That magento can not consume its own export without modification is mind numbing. You will end up writing your own scripts at some point, promise.
Theres so much more I could list but I simply don't have the time. But I'll leave you with this.
Magento Go was killed off for a reason.
Few More Thoughts:
I see too many developers in love with the complexity they create. That someone can, with little experience, successfully build something with a tool is a complement to it's design, not a flaw. That someone must consume an entirely new, unintuitive way of reinventing the wheel is a flaw of which Rub Goldberg would be proud.
The wordpress developer vs magento developer argument is nonsense. Pythonistas have the right idea:
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.