Nick BartlettPHP Developer in Minnesota

I’ve recently started a side project for a friend building an ecommerce solution that requires some customizations.  I’ve read about Magento and attended a presentation about it at ZendCon 2008 by a couple guys from Varien, the company that built Magento, and viewed a few of their sample sites.  Because I have years of experience with oscommerce ecommerce, I was eager to dive right in and customize one of these!  Unfortunately, it turns out Magento sucks to work on.  Yes, I said Magento sucks.

Features

Magento has nearly all the ecommerce features you could imagine.  It has pretty much everything that oscommerce ever had, even after installing a hundred community contributions. They support downloadable products, grouped products, different customer types (retail, wholesale) and pricing for each, and a variety of payment and shipping modules.  Magento has “current” features such as tagging and tag clouds and on the backend also has a caching mechanism to speed things up on the site.

Bugs

There are some bugs in Magento and this is expected with any software.  They’ve been releasing an updated version every 2-3 weeks.  I’m still waiting on the payment subscription feature and a bug fix that will allow me to assign downloadable products to a group product.

Interface

Looking over a Magento store from the front end and peering into the source code you’ll quickly notice it uses very few tables.  On a given page, there was one small table in one of the sidebar objects.  That’s it!  Very good for search engine optimization.

Admin

The admin took a little getting used to.  Especially the product configuration as it’s laid out a little differently than the oscommerce I’m used to.  The main problem with the admin is that it’s freak’in SLOW!!!!  The ajax page content thing is cool and all, but not when it takes a minute to refresh!  It’s ridiculous.  At one time I had four tabs open and three of them loading a page in the admin while I worked on another.  I’ve tried it in firefox and google chrome and after reading the forums, I’m not the only one with these troubles.

Modifying code

The code… well, sad to say, but the learning curve is extremely steep.  I’m not talking in hours or days… weeks is getting closer, and I’d feel comfortable with months if you’re putting in a few hours per week.  It would probably make things a hellava lot easier if you’re a Zend Framework master as Magento is built on top of the Zend Framework.  Look into the code and you’ll just dig into directories eight or ten levels deep.  Many of the directories contain sub directories with the same name, making things even more confusing.  Each sub directory may contain one to four files and each file has about 50 to 100 lines of code that seem to only call an object or set a variable.  Where is the meat and potatoes?  You know, the controller containing all the logic?  Oh, and the XML config files for every modules and chunk of code in the system are kinda cool, but I really don’t know how they work at this point.  Below is a screen shot from my Zend Studio looking at a project and a sample file.

Customizing

After looking at this code for an hour, I decided to try the old way of locating something in a file.  Yep, I went to the product detail page and copied the text “product description” that was printed on the page, then search the whole codebase for it.  Nothin.  Ok, it must be in the database somewhere, so check the database… damn… over 200 tables!  I tried this a few times and came up empty.

If you don’t have 100-200 hours to learn the Zend Framework and play around with Magento, then I’d say forget about making customizations to it.  Yeah, it’s open source, but not too many do it yourselfers (if any) are going to be able to modify and taylor this thing to their needs.  Sure, it’s an awesome piece of work, but take it as it is or find something else.

How they make their money

They build the most complicated open source package I have every seen… by far.  Sure, it’s open source and maybe they “gave back to the community”… no.  It’s obvious the first time you hit their website that they’re in this for big bucks.  They make it easy to download, but as soon as you need something altered, it’s damn near impossible for any casual coder.  It’s still a challenge for a PHP Expert and Zend Certified Engineer without the proper training and experience.  They do have a tutorial on “how to customize Magento” at http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/groups/174/changing_and_customizing_magento_code , which pretty much just tells you how to merge a new release into your existing one and show you how to create a module.  Professional installation currently goes for $149 from Magento.  I was able to install Magento on my local server, but it took some tweaking and working around a few of their bugs to get it to work.  Speaking of bugs, if you want support from them it’ll cost between $42 and $1500/yr.  Why not just look on the forums?  There are a zillion questions on their forums, but no answers.  Figures… you gotta pay for the answers. How about professional training?  Yes, they offer 19 hours of professional training for $1000. They’ve done a great job at ensuring they have jobs for a few years supporting this beast.

If you want to master this solution

1. You need to be an object oriented PHP expert.
2. You need an awesome IDE to work with that has intellisense. Zend Studio is a good choice. Don’t even think about using Dreamweaver here folks.
3. Gain experience with Zend Framework.
4. You must have a lot of time available to learn this solution
5. Pay for their training and figure out how this damn thing works.

Thanks Varien for the cool product, but it’s not for me right now.  Don’t have the hundreds of hours to learn your system; there are much easier shopping cart solutions available.

What percent of email is spam you ask? Since I work at a datacenter and ISP, we have a spam filter solution for tens of thousands of email accounts that filters 12 to 20 million emails per day. I came across this chart the other day that will give you a visual idea of what percent of email is spam. As of early 2009, 99.5% of all email passing through our spam filter is not delivered, or is flagged as spam. This is unbelievable! I can’t believe email actually works!

Unfortunately a lot of the time email doesn’t work. I run an online business and regularly our important message about a customer’s order is not delivered. We have two email accounts in use for the business, one of them a gmail account and both send in plain text. Important messages are sent to the customer twice, once through each account and very often neither message reached the customer’s inbox. Today the spam filters are doing an amazing job, but I feel there is a high probability that within a few years email will be on it’s way out because it’s not reliable and the spammers will reign.

Version 2.7 of wordpress recently came out and I needed to upgrade because the flash image uploader was no longer working for my version of wordpress as flash 10 broke it.  Anyway, the upgrade was pretty simple and I’ll include the basic steps below.

1. Backup your database and files.

2. Overwrite the files in the root of your wordpress site.  Be sure not to overwrite the config.php file.

3. Overwrite the wp-admin and wp-includes directories and all files inside them.

4. Go to the admin (wp-admin) and it’ll notify you if a database upgrade is required.  If it is, click the one button on the screen, wait a second, and then it’s done.

Piece of cake.

If you’re upgrading your wordpress site, I encourage you to follow their detailed instructions at http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress

I recently restored a mysql database from a backup and come to find it wouldn’t allow any modifications.  The problem was the database belonged to user “root”, which is what I used with SSH to restore the database.  The user needs to be mysql.

The fix

Open an SSH connection and navigate to /var/lib/mysql/ and run the following command to recursively set all database owners to mysql -

chown -R mysql:mysql *

My wife and I walked through Costco a month ago and decided to purchase a membership today (Sunday) after church so we could purchase some items and try to save some money.  After 1.5 hours at the place, I was ready to go and couldn’t wait to get out of there.  Mainly because the place was extremely busy and everybody was lost and standing around in the middle of the isles.  Yes, I am an impatient person.  I’m the “get what you need and go” type.  Anyway, below is a hint at my experience and why I’ve decided Costco sucks.

1. Costco does not accept Visa or Mastercard credit cards. Only American Express. This is bullshit. I’ve never heard of a company doing this. I wonder if they realize that Visa and Mastercard are more popular than American Express and that most of the population does not have an American Express card? They will, however, accept a Visa or Mastercard debit card. When you go to Costco you don’t just spend twenty dollars, you spent hundreds. Most Americans these days will need to put that on credit.  Many other Americans, like me, do not use credit cards anymore because they always screw you on the fees and cost you more than they’re worth.  Costco has dramatically limited the number of customers that will, or can, shop at their store by requiring cash or American Express.
2. No isle signs.  As a new customer and most of the return customers shopping at Costco today, we were all totally lost. They have huge crowded isles and the customers are pushing a loaded two hundred pound tank of a shopping cart all over the store looking for items. Let me give you a hint Costco executives… have you every been to a grocery store? Ever noticed the handy little signs hanging above the isles stating the kinds of products located in that isle?
3. Little to no organization.   I might actually be able to answer the question above on my own as I realized there isn’t any organization of the pallet loads of product in each isle. One isle had a pallet of ginormous containers of Pine Sol right next to a pallet of grape juice. This is just one example of many.
4. Odd sized packaging. How is the consumer supposed to easily figure out if they’re saving money at your store if all your products are odd sizes and off brand? The house branded Kirkland I can understand, but when it comes to standard brand name products like cereal, soda, and paper products, it’s difficult to compare. The coke products are not standard 12 or 24 packs, they’re 32 packs or something like that. I could easily calculate the saving if it were a 30 pack, but they made it 32 just to be difficult.
5. No plastic bags at the checkout. Again, ever been to a standard retail store?
6. No “mobile” employees. The only employees you find at the store is the door guards, returns people, cashiers, and a guy in the deli. That’s it! You know why nobody is working the floor at Costco? Because they’d be bombarded by customers who are lost all day!
7. Their selection sucks. Costco has a little bit of everything, but not enough of anything. They have six kinds of cereal to choose from, three kinds of shampoo, one kind of any paper product, one choice for frozen pizza, two kinds of dog food, etc. This also limits the customers’ ability to compare costs as Costco doesn’t have what you want. The main reason we paid for a Costco membership is for cheap diapers. They have one brand of diapers, which is fine, but they start at size 2, which is for 15 to 22lb babies. My son was born at 7lbs and is now 9lbs. Huggies makes a newborn and size 1 Costco! Stock the product line or don’t stock it at all!
8. They don’t accept manufacturer coupons.

After we loaded our cart I’d had it. I was ready to ask for a refund and had walked half way back up to the returns desk where I just paid $50 for a membership (I did not get the American Express card with the membership). I decided that we’ll just have to come on weekdays when it’s not so busy and we’re limited to a few products there. Cheap diapers is the main reason we paid for the membership and they didn’t even have the right size.  It’s difficult to tell if I save any money at Costco, which is the only reason anybody shops there.  One thing I do get from Costco is grey hair.  This is why I think Costco sucks.