Magento

This is great news for magento and developers/designers alike. I expect that will see some interesting contributions over time.
Cheers
Adam

Can we see a preview?

Oh pretty please!

Thanks Adam. We are very excited about the prospects

@Kadima - not yet, unfortunately. We are still hard at work on the features. It’s looking great so far though.

Awesome idea!

Question about Magento contributions:  Will there be some sort of quality control or perhaps a voting system in place for the contributions?  While contributions from the community are always appreciated, I find that most of them (at least when it comes to osCommerce) are very poorly written and full of bugs.  There is also often a lack of consistency in the style of code and naming conventions.  At best it’s a minor annoyance, but at worst it can cause compatibility and security issues.  I don’t want to sound ungrateful for all the work put into the contributions I use, but at the end of the day, I can’t afford to deal with the problems.  I would almost prefer that some contributions not even be released to the public if they can’t compare in quality to the core product.  Hopefully this won’t be an issue with Magento, especially considering it’s much higher quality core and modular nature.  And of course, anything I write I will release back to the community and make sure it is of equal quality to Magento.

@i960 - You are absolutely correct. Generally speaking, the quality and process with some other open source eCommerce applications has failed (at best). We don’t intend this to be the case with Magento.

We’ve spent hours and days thinking over what would be the ideal process and think we have some good ideas. We’ll share those in the next few weeks and hope to get community feedback.

Glad to hear you’re thinking about that, because I think community contributions can actually make or break a product.  If the quality of osC and it’s contributions were higher, I may never have went looking for something new, and wouldn’t have stumbled upon Magento.

Off topic (and I hope this is kosher here): I posted in a thread yesterday about the future of osC on their forum.  I mentioned that something new and better is coming and is expected in Q1 of 2008.  I didn’t mention the name Magento out of respect for the osC team.  Their product may suck, but that doesn’t mean it’s ok to spam them on their own forum.  Well, the response to that one post was tremendous. I have received over 50 PM’s since then asking what this new and better product is.  Of course, I’ve been obliging them through PM.  Apparently there are a lot of people not happy with osC, and are itching to try something new.

@i960 - We’ve done our best not to mention osCommerce and other projects out of respect and professionalism. I think there is a lot to learn from each project (no one can argue that the community building of osCommerce has been a failure), but there are many negatives as well. With the community’s help I am certain we have the right mix of talent to put together an outstanding product with Magento.

We are here for the long run.

RoyRubin - 31 October 2007 05:36 PM

@i960 - You are absolutely correct. Generally speaking, the quality and process with some other open source eCommerce applications has failed (at best). We don’t intend this to be the case with Magento.

We’ve spent hours and days thinking over what would be the ideal process and think we have some good ideas. We’ll share those in the next few weeks and hope to get community feedback.

I’m looking forward to hearing the ideas that the Magento team have come up with for this.

Sounds great! I´m looking forward to become a part of the magento-family via magento-connct.

@Roy: Great job so far. I´m sure that the interview with you and Yoav in the german it-magazine T3N will give magento an additional boost…

I actually responded on the osC forum along with i960.  I appreciate him cluing me in to this new cart, as we were getting tired with the problems of other solutions. 

I am very pleased with what I see so far in Magento, as well as the direction you are taking this system.  Our company is looking for a more enterprise level package that is still open-source.  This cart is the only thing coming close!

Can I make a few suggestions?

1. Speed is crucial - I have to voice a concern that some others have noticed—Magento seems very slow compared to other carts.  Just check out the demo store on this site. It is just plain slow, especially when loading the first time.  Now if there are some settings and tweaks you guys didn’t set up on the demo store to make it faster, I think you ought to do it because the demo is what everyone is looking at.  I’ve tried Magento carts on several different machines and they ALL load slowly.  The queries may need to be streamlined and caching may need to be improved.  I hope this Speed issue is being addressed.  This thing ought to be a bullet with so few visitors and products on it.

2. The Admin doesn’t have to do everything - One thing I started to realize as our company grew was that the website/admin didn’t have to do everything.  In the end, the website serves the main purpose of communicating with customers, selling products, and capturing order data.  Eventually any larger e-retail company will have to get an order management system to more efficiently handle the order processing and shipping once the orders are captured by the cart.
Inevitably, people will post on this forum asking that Magento should handle all sorts of order processing, shipping, etc. Basically, they’ll want this cart to do everything. That’s not the job of a cart admin.  Leave that job to an order management system.  Plus you don’t want 20 employees working in the admin with hundreds of customers browsing the front end at the same time.

3. True ‘Enterprise’ should have user accounts and have excellent data in/out flow - For true enterprise level functionality, I hope Magento will include user accounts for the marketing dept, content writers, product specialists, etc.  IOW, in our biz we have one guy who watches and updates products, another that just writes content pages and constantly does SEO, etc.  It would be great if my content writer could login to Magento and just have access to the content section of admin, write pages in HTML, and then leave them for approval.  Then I can go in as admin and approve them and make them active.  Also, my SEO and marketing guy can login and just have access to marketing functions.  No current open-source cart truly does this, but it may be a very useful function to have in a growing business.  There should be a log kept by the admin of each users usage and time.

Also, getting data in and out of the cart is crucial.  It should be easy to mass-update products, pages, etc.  It should be easy to connect to order management systems, etc.

Just some ideas I would hope to see.  Again, things are looking great!!