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Magento has been planed and executed as a commercial open source project. The explosive growth of the Community is evidence the strategy of Varien is successful.
One of the best things about Magento is it’s flexibility and extendability.
The possibility to write re-usable modules and easily build packages out of them if what won me for Magento.
Like a lot of other developers, at first I was enthusiastic to finally be able to build projects on a real good open source platform.
I believe the architecture of Magento is excellent and full of potential.
But, my feelings have changed. I’m no longer enthusiastic but rather sobered.
When programming extensions I hit the limits.
Varien built their product in a way that most changes have to be made by <rewrites> of core classes.
That works very well when Modules only have to run within one project. But because I release Extensions on Magento Connect, Conflicts between Modules happen.
The answer is easy: more events!
On February 15th, 2008, Moshe posted a thread in the programming forum on magentocommerce.com asking for event requests.
As far as I know, so far none of the posted events posted have made it into a release. It’s not only me who is annoyed by that.
I wish for more dialog between Varien and the community. More feedback to posted code.
Community Support is great, but when the community wants to help Magento become even better, it’s damaging not to answer at all.
In Germany, Rico as the community manager is wonderful, the booked out meet-magento event is proof of that. But he can’t provide the transparency regarding the continuing development of Magento.
Someone with a direct connection to the core dev team is required.
For me, the great thing about open source is I can participate. I find it very deeply satisfying to see people use (and like) the products of my work.
It’s easy sharing extensions with Magento Connect. But with the growing number of developers and modules the infrastructure created isn’t enough anymore.
To enthuse developers like me continuously some things need to be developed further, the sooner the better:
* A better bug tracking system. It would be so cool if the community developers could use it for their community modules, too.
There are some essentials missing in the current system. To long titles are truncated without warning.
If comments are posted or the bug status changes no email is sent to the author. Unless he looks after the comments every day the bug may be closed without it being fixed.
Please, more communication. It’s no fun spending time hunting a bug, reporting it as cleanly as possible, and then not even getting to know what really happens with it.
* A good search for Magento connect. (How often must Varien hear that every day?)
Enough said.
There is more that can be improved, but more transparency, a better bug tracker, and a search for Magento Connect are (for me) the most important!
I am very grateful towards Varien for Magento.
I love working with it.
I want Magento to continue to grow.
I want to contribute to that.
Vinai
Link to the original blog post: http://tinyurl.com/brf5w8
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