Magento

Hello,

I’m a web developer who is evaluating Magento for a photographer client. I’m looking for a shopping cart that is configurable and extensible so that I can dynamically import products into the catalog as he uploads them to his online gallery. This doesn’t have to be done in real time; it could be a batch process or a process that he initiates after each upload.

Is Magento open enough and documented well enough to allow me (with several years of procedural PHP and some OOP PHP experience) to pull this integration together? I realize that this is an impossible question, given none of you know me or my work, but broad answers as to the flexibility of the platform would be very helpful.

Thank you,
Alan Page

It’s pretty flexible, but right now it’s poorly documented.
It can probably handle selling your client’s wares, but it might be overkill for that.  You’ll have to write the part that pulls in the information to put in the database, and remember that it’s not just a product, it’s a lot of attributes of the product and how to sell it and how to display it. But you could add that type of external program to most any shopping cart.

I saw a thread in these forums about having a cron job to update the best sellers or to calculate the most popular to use as upsells, so I think you could use that approach if nothing else.