Hi, I'm in the middle of selecting a provider for a major shopping cart redesign on a freelance website. I'm getting many different recommendations but one i found interesting re magento: Since posting the project several Magento experts who would prefer to use Magento have suggested other platforms would be more suitable. Here is an example of what has been said: -------------------------------------------------------- "First, about the shopping cart system, as I mentioned before, magento is a very popular shopping cart system now with many new features, but the disadvantage of it is in content pages. It is not a CMS so it will be difficult for you to manage content pages on the site. Especially on your site, there are a lot of content pages. If you want to be able to manage content pages easily, I think other platforms are more suitable." --------------------------------------------------------- This was from a company who use magento as their main ecommerce/shopping cart platform and looking at their website it seems they certainly prefer to use it over other platforms. They initially recommended magento but after looking at my site they said it would be bettter to use virtuemart and you can see what they said above. They also said it is much harder for the user to make changes etc through the back end admin! Because this company clearly prefers to use magento I guess i felt that their advice was good as it wasn't to their advantage to say otherwise. Another company also agreed with them after initially recommending magento. Once they saw my site and what i have copied above, they agreed.......... But this from another company: Here are some interesting facts about Magento CMS which I am confident would dispel any doubts you have on Magento's CMS capability 1) As you know, Joomla is one of the leading CMS systems, used extensively for content management purposes only. Magento and Joomla have the SAME editor - tinyMCE. So this means that Magento can do as much with its editor that Joomla can. 2) Further to this, Magento also has the capability of allowing for a change in editor. So you can work either with tinyMCE or FCKeditor. Whichever one you find to be more advanced. For your particular case, I would recommend sticking with tinyMCE, since you are already experienced with it from you informational website 3) Until its latest edition, Magento was infact NOT content management friendly, as the editor was disabled and could only be enabled by progammers. However, Magento latest edition 1.4 has a fully enabled editor which is no different from Joomla. Providers who tell you otherwise have not worked with the Magento latest edition. -------------------------------------------------------- So what do you guys think? What is the truth? Who is right? Any thoughts on this magento CMS friendly or not debate would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Well, it is true that with 1.4 there is now a wysiwyg editor for content pages. That does not make magento a good cms. A good cms manages pages and helps keep things organized. In my opinion, that is not something magento does well. It's designed as a shopping cart, not a cms, so while it now has a decent text editor, it does not suddenly become a good cms.
I've used Magento extensively, which is fine as I code HTML etc and i've learnt the syntax. Now the latest edition 1.4.0.1 does not even have a working paypal checkout module, 3D-Secure is broken and its crazily buggy. In terms of CMS, you can edit pages, yet there is no way to add them onto a menu and you had to manually add links to the pages into the theme/other pages which can be tiresome. We are still on magento 1.3 as this works for us.
Thanks for the replies so far. So i will find it harder to add content pages in magento than i do through my current Joomla admin? How much harder is it to use for the average web site owner? Does the new version eliminate some of the problems studentlingerie mentioned? Many thanks in advance for your help
First of all, Magento takes much time to load. Really, I thought magento is best by design. But they should improve the website must load faster. They url rewriting is very bad comparing to other commerce systems. They have to make good url rewriting for products.
True... However Magneto is now loading faster it is too much complicated to edit template and change design. There are more popular software if you want to build eCommerce like x-cart and oscommerce. Now a days Wordpress with ecommerce mode is also popular