Magento

Chris - this is absolutely great. My company uses osCommerce and it’s been absolute hell to upgrade and you pretty much had to get started from scratch to do so. I am glad to see that you guys have addressed it in Magento and I look forward to trying it out.

Love it! Thanks guys - can’t wait to see the demos when they are up.

I am a web designer and installing contribution on Zen Cart and osCommerce has been a nightmare. The quality of the plugins are very poor and I would find myself lost when having an issue. Forget about upgrades as well - its a done deal once you touch the code. Sounds like this will not be a problem with Magento. Happy to see that!

Thank you for the comments! Magento’s premise is to make an upgrade (features or core) as simple as possible. This is absolutely key for us. We’ll have more information regarding the architecture in future posts.

I’ll second StevenG and just say that I feel boxed in in my Yahoo store. “Take it or leave it” solutions are just not good enough in this day and age. Magento sounds like will be giving us the gift of choice and right in time for Christmas!

As a store owner myself, I’ve taught myself the basics of html over many endless nights just so I could add a link here or there or change some text and Chris, I kid you not, to this day I’m on version 2.0 in fear of upgrading to the latest 5.0 version so I do not lose my pages. When is Magento out I can’t wait to get out of this SOS Commerce!

"You can upgrade Magento with the click of a button or through our auto update while still retaining your custom changes to the coupon module.”

What about other code changes and/or modules? How will this be effected by upgrades?

Looked at the video and, so far, like what I see. I normally offer my clients installations of Cre Loaded, osCommerce or Zen Cart. Can’t say that any of these systems are optimized for speed. Although, importing categories, customers, products and orders is easy between the 3 applications. Hopefully, Magento will offer the ability of importing important data from these applications making the move to Magento a breeze.

Supreme Center Hosting - Given our background with osCommerce, we feel very strong about compatibility and expect to have import engines available to migrate from osCommerce / Zen Cart / CreLoaded.

Supreme Center Hosting: 

One of the most valuable architectural differences in Magento (at least from my perspective as a developer) is that to customize module’s functionality you do not need to touch it’s code, hence the upgrades will always be breeze and painless. 

Instead, you just create a new module that will contain features and customizations for your specific project. In the configuration of your new module you will specify which of the models or features you are going to replace in original module and the application will know to use your code instead of original. 

If after customization you are interested in upgrading the application, and the modules require an upgrade of the original module to the next major version, you will have to update your customizations to be compatible with new API.

This approach allows for much more other nifty things besides upgradability, such as:
* Packing your customizations for backup and sharing with community;
* Disabling it in favor of original functionality in case of bugs or suspicious behaviour;
* You name it

I know this may be confusing and we intend to explain it in more detail in the future. If you have any other questions - let us know.

Woohoo! Long live Magento (if it really is as good as it seems… I’ve got exactly the same problem with Cubecart - scared to upgrade my clients websites for hell WILL break loose. And paying for an ecommerce solution with all the features included is just impossible so this really would be great! Keep up the good work!

What about if the customizations require changes to the database structure, either adding new fields to existing tables or creating new tables?
Will the update process be able to handle these changes?

Carlos – The Magento update process will only alter and never overwrite the existing database, therefore any added custom columns or tables will not be affected.

unless you happen to have used the same column name, or is that covered through coding guidelines/conventions ?
Not sure if this can be enforced ...

Btw, what about the support of databases. MySQL obviously but will there be a support for PostgreSQL or Oracle as well? So is the database layer abstract?

@Aarne - Actually there are few levels of resource abstraction in Magento.
In a nutshell:
The low level abstraction is ensured by PDO and Zend_Db layers.
Moreover, due to separation between object models and resource models it is possible to create database interfaces that would employ resource logic specific to the engine.
For example, MySQL4 is able to work only with tables and most of the logic needs to be built in PHP.
However, MySQL5, PostgreSQL, Oracle and MSSQL can have procedures, views and triggers, which would allow moving the logic to the database and could have great effect on performance and integrity of data.
Potentially it will be possible to create an interface layers that would use the features specific to each engine.
These layers could be developed as additional modules and co-exist with current resource logic.
Also most of the main entities such as customers, products, orders were implemented using entity-attribute-value model , which will give an incredible flexibility with custom fields and queries, without updating the low level database structure.
More information will be available in inline php docblocks and wiki docs.

@moshe:

Truly excellent! Can’t wait to get some night reading of docs and wiki.

Humm.....I tried to find the update system but didn’t find it.....can someone please guide me
Or is it not released yet ? ....
sorry for the noob questions but i’m sitting on the pc for 12 hours now :S

Just yesterday i installed the Magento and today when i came i saw a new version O_o
just want to update it .....

-Regards