Magento Ecommerce Literally Giving Away the Store
Ecommerce platforms be afraid. Be very afraid. Today I stumbled on a brand new ecommerce solution under development by the extraordinary team at Varien. On top of being free and open source, the platform looks to rival the functionality of longer established, (much) higher priced ecommerce solutions on the market.
Presumably because it's still in it's pre-1.0 release phase, installing Magento on my server proved far too complicated for me to figure out on my own. Until Magento reaches the point in it's development where software practically installs itself, I won't be able to officially test it out myself. You might get lucky and find some enthusiastic young developer, who is more savvy with the finer points of programming than I, who would jump at the chance to install it for you though. In the few months since they started, an sizeable developer community has sprung up around the project.
If you ask me, It's about time someone open sourced ecommerce. Not unlike in web conferencing, the current market leaders in ecommerce platforms are so behind the curve, functionally speaking, that I was beginning to think bespoke web developers would get to keep their jobs. That's not to say there aren't some terrific, out-of-the-box ecommerce solutions available. I have nothing but good things to say about Volusion, which I might select to power the future version of Wine Menu because of my great experiences with them.
Ty
For anyone who's watching the Magento Story, here's a little update on their open source ecommerce platform. First, Magento has recently come out of Beta and is on it's 1.0 release. Installation on Dreamhost servers has gotten a little easier since I last tried to put up a test site. Thank god. My test site is finally up at www.vincrates.com, where I will attempt to create a new product offering for Wine Menu built on the Magento platform. I sure wish I had development help for this though. There's not much to see there since I havn't made any great deal of effort to brand it yet. Stay tuned in for the full story on getting Vincrates up and running on Magento.
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