Magento

Has anyone been able to get this OS ecommerce “evolved” actually implemented on their own with all the bells and whistles it has?  I really would like to know.  Anyone that does not know “code” or is not a programmer?  I’d like to see a finished site because I’ve been steadly working on even trying to figure out how it works and how to get it to work.  My Platinum Partner host has not been able to get the telescope theme to work, nor the direct resize, nor any wysiwyg editor installed.  I just don’t think this is developed for any retailer to simply implement, but if I’m wrong, someone please tell me how.  I’d still like to see a finished site by one of the community members and not one of the developers.

Here is a short list of Magento powered stores that have been developed by the community in the past month or so since V1.0 was released.

I must say that a great deal of this community has some development background, some more than others.

If you are not a technical person you have a few options now that will make things a bit easier.

1. Professional Installation is available
2. Professional Support is also available as of today.
3. Screencast videos that provide short tutorials on how to get started with many features.
4. The Magento User Guide

Hope this helps,

While it certainly helps to have a web development back end it isn’t entirely necessary either.  That being said there are really two areas of development, one is the design end that being HTML and CSS, which anyone who has down any web design work in the past (even simple web pages) should have encountered.  Changing Magento themes to suit your site using both HTML and CSS isn’t anything that different from any other system out there.  If you mean the backend and extending functionality then yes at the moment it can be a bit difficult to get things working.  The extensions you mention above are all third-party add-ons or changes in functionality and your mileage may vary with those.  If your Platinum Partner host can’t get those working, that is a worrisome sign as they aren’t all together that complicated.  That being said I do have design experience both as a front-end (theme) developer and a back end (code) developer.  I wish you the best of luck and I think that over time (and especially with the upcoming 1.1 release) you will find Magento to be a great platform.  It is just getting started and I think that it will become the platform of choice for e-commerce.

-Adam

There are also completed magento sites in the Showoff forum: http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewforum/37/

Basically your level of knowledge effects the level of changes you can make - but I would suggest looking at the screencasts and user guide and keep working your way through it.

From a developers point of view Magento is great, its flexibility is unheard of and its features are top notch.  As for a non dev type person, you may benefit from hiring someone better versed in Magento, because to put it simply, if Magento was as turnkey as Yahoo stores or such, its flexibilities and ability to be build upon, improved, and new version realeses would dramatically decrease, and cripple any ideas of getting custom coding done in a reasonable amount of time.