One of the biggest markets in web development is the e-commerce market. Somewhere in the middle of the past decade retailers and wholesale operators have discovered that there's a place which can't be ignored any longer and that's the world wide web.
Of course there were some that considered it was only a fad and they decided not to have a digital presence. Well, there have been people saying that a machine heavier than air will never fly and, guess what, that was wrong too.
The best example for this is the fall of the giant Blockbuster which refused a deal with Netflix, when Netflix was only but a shadow of what it is now. Since that time Blockbuster went through a crippling bankruptcy.
So if you are handling product sale and have yet "forgot" to build your online presence you should consider this.
Why Magento?
Magento is the top open-source platform used on the Internet as described in the TOP 10 e-commerce technologies on http://trends.builtwith.com/shop, with a market share of over 16 percent. Magento is now part of Ebay and was purchased a few years ago from the developer Varien.
The basis of the platform is Zend Framework, following best practices in terms of MVC OOP web development and Indexed EAVdatabase architecture.
The platform is built on a modular level, all modules, be them core, community or locally developed, allowing further development and extension.
The platform allows theming and has a very robust templating engine based on layout updates (XML or database defined).
It supports internationalization. String management being available both through CSV files (no portable object pain in the … neck) or in the database through the inline JavaScript translator.
Although it comes with prototype as the base JavaScript library, additional core libraries being prototype based as well, the platform support the addition of other libraries through their noConflict mode (eg. jQuery).
For businesses
I am sure that some of you have skipped the technical details provided above, so this is what you need to know.
Magento handles (by default):
- Order, shipments, invoices, credit memo management
- Customer, customer addresses management
- Full catalog and stock management, including product variation through custom options or configurable products
- Different payment and shipping methods (most used payment providers already have a module developed for Magento)
- CMS pages and static blocks for dynamic content management
- Reports concerning products, abandoned carts and more
The above is only a small piece of what Magento can do, as, with the right developer, everything can be extended and developed further.
For developers
As you may have understood from the above Magento follows a great deal of technical guidelines and is further improved by existing modules.
Although some of the used technologies are recognized as slow (EAV architecture), they have been further improved using optimized queries and data indexing (using secondary indexes on almost every table).
There will be too much to describe here for each technology so if you have questions please do comment and I will try and answer or provide other blog posts on the specific technologies or how-to-do-it tutorials in future posts.
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