Hi all, If you want to develop a Magento Webshop you may run into alot of problems. I want to make Magento more easier but I require testers for my visual Design Software for Magento (MagStudio 2015) and I am looking for volunteers who can provide feedback. I have a Magento background since 2008 and I came very aware of the many pitfalls of Magento and the strong learning curve. Therefor I have developed a visual design studio(Magstudio for Magento) just like Aptana but more easier to visual develop a Magento store without any coding involved for designers, webstore owners and developers. My software allows you to create Magento sites offline (or online) without coding but through an intuative interface. Setup magento offline in a matter of minutes not days Publish your e-commerce site to an online server Create new Magento projects offline Project management Real time design and edit your skins visually I require feedback from people who want to test this out (of course for free). Especially people who never used Magento or want to get started with building a shop, this tool can be very handy. The development is then steered by your feedback and I will give you a free version. Please send me a PM or respond below to get a test version of my MagStudio 2015 Many thanks and I am looking forward to your feedback!
"designing without code" isn't design -- it's art. DESIGN includes things like semantic markup, logical document order, graceful degradation, and a whole host of other things that no visual layout BS is going to accomplish which is why in my experience such tools are inherently flawed and will remain inherently flawed. I'm willing to have a look, but be warned that given the utter and complete gibberish Magento starts out vomiting up and has the giant pair of donkey brass to call HTML, I am highly skeptical your tool is going to be worth a flying purple fish. I'd LOVE someday to be proven wrong in this, but by it's very nature what you are describing is nube predating trash. I'd be far more interested in a link to an example site built with it instead of the product itself or some goofy screencaps. The quality of what can be made with it would tell me far, FAR more than the program itself would. Though if this theme: http://enterprise-demo.user.magentotrial.com/ Which is in the screencaps is typical of what this vomits up... Well... Endless pointless classes for nothing, endless pointless DIV for nothing, little if anything resembling logical document structure, static scripting in the markup, endless pointless scripttardery, that STUPID MALFING HALFWIT "let's wrap the HTML tag in a half dozen IE CC's to cover up developer ineptitude" that Paul Irish pissed all over the Internet with, fairy-tale robots meta values (there is NO SUCH THING as "INDEX" or "FOLLOW"), broken faviocon methodology (type actually breaks them), paragraphs around non-paragraph items, absolute URI's for no good reason other than to waste bandwidth, broken/incomplete/malformed forms, gibberish use of numbered headings, static STYLE in the markup, <style> inside BODY where it's completely invalid, scripttard links with no fallbacks, scripting on markup elements instead of hooking the markup, strong tags around things that should be headings and not "recieving more emphasis", redundant use of title attributes... Hence wasting 38k of markup on 990 BYTES of plaintext (content, whats' that?) and only six images I'd even treat as content. anywhere from four to eight times what should be present on such a simple page, and that's before we talk the rat*** bat*** dirty old **** 2.8 MEGABYTE pageload in 64 separate honking files... on a page that to be frank has NO excuse to be more than 512k in 14 files; 90% of that being the images! That 1.25 MEGABYTES in eight files of that disaster is CSS is so mind-bogglingly stupid, it truly lives up to the notion of "For people who know nothing about web development, BY people who know nothing about web development." It is a laundry list of how NOT to build a website and a monument to developer ineptitude -- ENTIRELY what I've come to expect from Magento so if that's what your little tool is vomiting up... well... It's rubbish. But that's pretty much what your post said though you may not have realized it. I truly pity the people dumb enough to fall for off the shelf templates or goofy "no programming needed" asshattery as it's basically deep-throating a shotgun whilst playing Russian roulette in a bus loaded with nitroglycerin going down a bumpy road. Then people wonder why most web startups fail in their first six months, or become money pits that fail to live up to expected sales figures -- THERE'S WHY! Take the sleazy shortcut, here's your result!
Hi there deathshadow thanks for your reply and feedback! "designing without code" isn't design -- it's art. DESIGN includes things like semantic markup, logical document order, graceful degradation, and a whole host of other things that no visual layout BS is going to accomplish which is why in my experience such tools are inherently flawed and will remain inherently flawed. I think its between art and design. Designing without code can still be design. Just like when you are using photoshop or when you are an architect you shape the products that you make. Infact I call design just shaping stuff untill you like it. Here are some other definitions of design. Design is the creation of a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system (as in architectural blueprints, engineering drawings, business processes, circuit diagrams and sewing patterns). I think you talk about code design and infact it isn't code design but more graphic design but it is still design (no art) Design is also the realization of a concept or idea into a configuration, drawing, model, mould, pattern, plan or specification (on which the actual or commercial production of an item is based) and which helps achieve the item's designated objective(s). So designing without code isn't code design nor programming but still a form of design. You are certainly right to ask what sites can be build with it and lots of WYSIWYG editors produce a lot of garbage. You are certainly right that that specific theme is not a great theme (its the stock theme of Magento) However my software works on ANY skin and you can modify real-time your colors, layouts logo's images. So it helps people to fine tune their skins what takes normally a lot of time going manually through all the CSS. Another feature is the offline to online deployment so you can build sites locally first so you don't have to pay any hosting. This is great too as Magento servers can be costly. You type in a shop name and it will create your project. This means yes you can get magento running on your desktop within an hour. (from first download to trying) I have more details in my pdf. http://www.livesyncshop.com/download/Magstudio_overview.pdf Then people wonder why most web startups fail in their first six months, or become money pits that fail to live up to expected sales figures -- THERE'S WHY! Take the sleazy shortcut, here's your result! I get your point about the no programming needed concept (And your criticism) but any innovation and any good product must be intuitive and easy to use. So what I am doing and a lot of developers are just making things easier so you can spent time on other things (e.g. business) . You understand that that is a good thing in itself right? The discussion whether that is ethical depends, if the end result is a better result then it may be good but I agree that some people don't know what they are actually doing or generating. However, these tools are really helpful think about Pagelines (DMS) similar visual editing for wordpress. People use a skin, modify colors, layouts and its really effective. They still can download their own skins but customize it directly by changing CSS or inspect the elements. A funny thing is that I see your quote about Frontpage, basically my tool allows the same people can dig into coding or design the colors, css or inspect elements. With Frontpage you can still edit code ( I was a fan of that too) and Frontpage proved that you can use a form of graphical guidance and take shortcuts. In fact it was one of the first tools which allowed easy embeding of code such as a flash movie. (and one of the first WYSIWYG editors I believe) If you talk about business then these methods really speed up the project, deployment is faster, people can modify any skin they have bought and it gives them more control. Anyway you can test this real-time at my website livesyncshop.com/business-modeller-demo/ and here is a better video overview. Magento is a real big e-commerce platform despite of the flaws and sometimes over engineered architecture Download: http://www.livesyncshop.com/business-modeller-demo/ Thanks for your critical feedback. Right now I am trying to find a group for benchmarking this tool e.g. no development environment for Magento vs my Magento workspace
... and you UTTERLY and COMPLETELY missed the dripping sarcasm. Saying Frontpage is better than what people are sleazing out today is like saying a 1984 Yugo GV for the North American market or a Dolly Sprint is a better car than a FIAT 500L. That's the JOKE. They're both buggy broken outdated trash made my people who probably had no business making a product in the first place. Though that's a problem with the web, people accidentally taking sardonic wit as a serious statement. Easier and faster means jack **** if the result isn't fit to wipe with. Sadly all these "easier" tools pretty much doom the people unwilling to put the effort into learning or to hire someone to do the job properly to utter and complete failure. I mean sure, ooh you get to play with dragging sliders around and go for goofy colouration and border control, but that means nothing if the underlying template being worked on is such utter and complete developer ineptitude it can only be considered nube-bait. If you packaged with it a theme that wasn't such a waste of code and poster-child for "HTML, what's that?" development you MIGHT be on to something, though still simply encouraging people to start out dicking around with appearance without the knowledge of how any of it works is flat out predatory behavior. In my book, that's just taking advantage of people's ignorance and stupidity to make a fast buck, which is why tools like yours no matter how pretty or easy are for a real business the equivalent of Pirelli's Miracle Elixir. I'm not saying you can't make money with such a scam, but let's call a scam a scam, shall we? BTW, neither of the links in your new post seem to actually go anywhere meaningful -- they both redirect to the home of the domain and show the header/menu bar and a big empty grey page. What looks like a menu that should have dropdowns doesn't even seem to be functional... and seems to be for an entirely DIFFERENT domain. Admittedly, I've only tried it in FF, but really if it doesn't even work in Firefox you're not blowing my skirt up. Bad enough the nube-predating notion of the tool, without the links seemingly being dead/mish-mash of code typical of a fly-by-night operation. Now, that said, I can at least view the video -- some advice? Get some WCAG checks on the values people plug in / choose for things like colours and sizes. Pimp slap it so that people aren't allowed to declare font sizes in pixels, and check background-color to color on elements to give them a AA and AAA rating. THAT would at least TRY and address some of the accessibility failings... Likewise if you could show it working on a template that isn't such utter and complete rubbish that the developer who made it should be taken out and shot, it would far more impress me.