You're about to read a highly subjective and somewhat argumentative post which are my own opinions on the shortcoming of Magento and why I no longer enjoy working with the framework. Which doesn't mean I'm totally free of it at work :)

Short Background

I've been using Magento for around 2 years and during that time I have worked with both Magento CC and Magento Enterprise on a range of projects with budgets ranging from $15k - 250k. I've contributed open source extensions, reported bugs to the core issue queue and overall used the platform somewhat extensively.

We do quite a lot of migrations at work and previously I've seen other developers roll many different solutions from using a Feeds and Services combination to rolling their own importers but it was my turn and I decided to carry out some further research.

Comparing the Languages

I recently had to use the Date module in a custom booking form that was constructed using Drupal's awesome Form API. Now I'm sure someone is going to come along and prove me wrong but I couldn't find any documentation on the available widget types, form properties or much of anything to be honest. I did find a few wrong examples that were doing some weird hacks like overwriting #process.

Funny little problem this one. Magento Enterprise 1.11 does not use the theme name as part of the FPC uri. Therefore when switching themes within a package using the design exceptions you still see the cached version of the site. This is obviously a major issue when you're using the design exceptions to load a mobile theme.

Solution

Pretty straightforward, add the theme name to the FPC uri. It doesn't need much explaining so grab the source on Github.

I finally got around to publishing my Magento Mega Menu extension. It's fairly basic at this point but stands as a good starting point for developers.

Today I needed to install ionCube 5.3 to run WHMCS locally and it was surprisingly easy :)

1. Download ionCube from  http://www.ioncube.com/loaders.php
2. Copy the whole ioncube folder to
   

   /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3/lib/php/extensions/

3. Open /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5.3/php.ini
4. Add this line somewhere around line 1088 
   

   zend_extension="/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3/lib/php/extensions/
   ioncube/ioncube_loader_dar_5.3.so"

5. Restart Apache.

Done.

You may want to add posts from a plugin. Probably because you are loading data in from elsewhere like I was here using the REA XML Parser.

A while back I was asked to display a directory full of REAXML files on a WordPress site. To accomplish this I created a class which would convert the XML files into an associative array and then a plugin to use wp_insert_post() for each property. realestate.com.au accepts property data in their proprietary XML format as a means to import properties into your account on their website. Due to this feature many businesses are already producing REAXML documents from their custom software or another XML Provider, with this REAXML parser we are able to easily parse the data into our website.

As part of my research in the hopes of winning a position I applied for as a web developer in the city I am researching the companies two most used technologies Doctrine and Drupal. I've been developing web applications now for around 4 years and I've heard a lot about Drupal but I've never got around to testing it out. WordPress is the main platform I use at Mandurah Web with a few Joomla sites cropping up here and there.