Re: Magento shopping cart

I'm not totally opposed to using Magento, though I can see my comments, especially if it's what the client wants. I have been looking over the site and it does have a lot of features so I can see it saving some serious time, especially given the extras he wants. So Nathan, having used it, do you have any tips for a Magento newbie when it comes to integrating it with a custom site? I haven't found any integration documentation for programmers yet. Skip Nathan Nobbe wrote:

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 2:25 PM, Skip Evans <skip@bigskypenguin.com <mailto:skip@bigskypenguin.com>> wrote:

    Ashley Sheridan wrote:

        Why spend ages reinventing the wheel?

i whole heartedly agree.

    I've come across so many clients using third party carts who have
    been unhappy with the final results. I hear so often "It does eighty
    percent of what we need, but we do things like this [insert
    idiosyncratic business practice here]."

thats why a lot of the modern incarnations have embraced the concept of modularization, eg. plugins / skins etc. etc. just look back a os-commerce / zen-cart; the notion of skins they had was horrific, basically since the ui was intertwined w/ logic, skins were tied to revs of the application - ouch! the community has matured a lot since then from what i gather.

    And then getting a third party cart to do what they wanted was often
    either incredibly frustrating/time consuming, or often just not doable.

i think in most cases, anymore, youre mainly looking at ramp-up time on how to use / customize / extend an existing third party system. while that can be sucky, you should really weigh the trade-off between that and getting beaten over the head w/ requests to develop the most common place look-and-feel customization crap / features. ive started to lean towards the former in my personal career, having come from zealous devotion to the later in my initial years in the industry.

    Yes, writing a cart takes time, but I've found I can whip them out
    pretty easily, and I have a lot of code I reuse all the time. I
    pretty much have a complete basic cart stored away, but I
    intentionally keep its functionality to a minimum so that I can
    expand on it to their specifications.

ok, well, when your custom cart has all the features of magento / [your fav e-commerce platform here] let me know. ill have finished up the proprietary plugins that make my site unique and have forgotten pretty much everything about silly crap id never want to write - like custom look at feel, crm, reports etc etc. o and also, when you have as many users / devs hitting your codebase as some of the popular platforms, im interested in hearing about that as well, lol. -nathan

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