6 ms·

I've never met anyone who uses Magento that actually likes it.

lhorie 8y ago
Shrug, I have. (Used to work in an agency where it got chosen over other similar options for its integrations with various things). Plenty of devs dislike working with "boring" industries like e-commerce and plenty more like to hate on anything remotely related to PHP, but that doesn't mean there aren't people actively making a living with those tools exclusively.
- nicoburns 8y ago
  I like working with modern PHP, but Magento really is a beast of a codebase. I've worked places where it was chosen as the best available (open source) option, but nobody liked working with it...
tclancy 8y ago
On the plus side, one of my few interactions with it left me with a bug story that's a solid intro at meetups and interviews: a frontend dev friend was stuck with a problem in Magento back when it was still pretty new and he could not get Amazon Fulfillment working with it. I dug in, did what the docs said, but could not get it working in sandbox mode. Finally, under a time crunch for him and due to schedule tightness on my end, I turned on production mode and everything just worked. End of story. Two days later UPS knocked and I was the accidental owner of some 500 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets I needed to mail back to my friend's client. The only time I've ever had a bug show up in real life at my house.
greglindahl 8y ago
I don't know if people like it or not, but there certainly are a bunch of high-traffic websites that use it... which is how you end up getting purchased by Adobe. Not quite like getting purchased by Oracle, but still.
tomc1985 8y ago
I really wanted to. But Magento is a fucking mess. V2 took a fairly comprehensible API and made it labyrinthine. And don't look to closely at its chosen database schema...
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Magento 2 has been an absolute unmitigated disaster from day 1. We won't touch it now and I know many Magento shops who feel the same way.
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    I personally just love the undocumented behavior changes between minor version upgrades.....
  - jimnotgym 8y ago
    We pressed on with "M2" and are doing fine with it. The major stumbling blocks I saw for our devs were: 1) Magento sites are normally full of plug-ins. The plug-in eco-system is much less mature for M2. We had to pay to fix a lot of bugs in plugins. 2) The new basket and checkout (for instance) relies much more on client side JavaScript (it saves as you write for instance). Our seasoned Magento devs were inexperienced with that kind of application, after years of working on php server side code only. The rest has been actually a pretty good experience.
    - tomc1985 8y ago
      We have run into a number of issues related to our integrations, the biggest of which was a documented behavior changing completely after a minor version upgrade, which completely broke our shit. (The behavior is that all orders go into "Processing" status after payment clears, regardless of any statuses you may have added and whatever you have set to be default for the 'Processing' superstatus. Doesn't help that the data flow for orders supremely confusing) Also whoever wrote their JS needs to be shot. How it is acceptable to load your HTML buttons in one order and then, at the last second, suddenly switch to the opposite order. It was like all those Hawaii missile warning interface UI memes from a few months ago, except real life.
jacquesm 8y ago
That's true, but it gets the job done. It's like Wordpress (and Wordpress/WooCommerce), nobody loves it but it powers a surprising number of businesses.
cepth 8y ago
As the saying goes, compare Magento to the alternatives, not to the almighty. If you're running an ecommerce operation that is too small to justify building a custom CMS, and can't justify paying for Demandware/Salesforce Commerce Cloud, your options are really limited. Shopify and Big Commerce offer good out of the box functionality, but you are then stuck with their feature sets and pricing tables. Each platform taxes you in various ways. Shopify imposes 0.5-2.0% fees on transactions processed with external credit card processors. Big Commerce forces you to upgrade your plan after your sales exceed a certain threshold. For even ecommerce companies doing several million dollars a year in revenue, Magento community edition (open source) is sufficient. You pay up front for development or design work, pay annual server costs, and can scale your ecommerce technology spend on your schedule. Magento has given me extreme headaches at times, but once we had our site up and running it was easy to maintain and administer. The non-technical people, i.e. the people who are actually packing and shipping orders, quickly picked up using the admin panel. So, yeah, I like Magento just fine.
- wila 8y ago
  So far the only somewhat sane alternative is prestashop. At least I don't worry what breaks this time on a security update, which is a real PITA with magento. For updates to magento shops I schedule time, for updates to prestashop I press a button..
  - cepth 8y ago
    We actually used to run our site off of Prestashop. The biggest reason that I saw to switch was because of the lack of integrations with some of our operations tech stack. For example, Freshdesk has an official extension/add-on for Magento, but on PrestaShop the only add-on is a $39.99 option made by a 3rd party developer. Prestashop is probably easier to administer than Magento, but that comes with tradeoffs because of its smaller developer ecosystem.
    - wila 8y ago
      Understood, it might not fit for every shop. For quite a lot of shops it works quite well though. I guess that it wasn't so much that the add-on came at a cost, but more that it was: a) a 3rd party developer b) the only option As you said it was just one of your issues.
wmeredith 8y ago
Sounds like it will be a fine addition to Adobe’s collection.

Shrug, I have. (Used to work in an agency where it got chosen over other similar options for its integrations with various things). Plenty of devs dislike working with "boring" industries like e-commerce and plenty more like to hate on anything remotely related to PHP, but that doesn't mean there aren't people actively making a living with those tools exclusively.

nicoburns 8y ago
I like working with modern PHP, but Magento really is a beast of a codebase. I've worked places where it was chosen as the best available (open source) option, but nobody liked working with it...

tclancy 8y ago

On the plus side, one of my few interactions with it left me with a bug story that's a solid intro at meetups and interviews: a frontend dev friend was stuck with a problem in Magento back when it was still pretty new and he could not get Amazon Fulfillment working with it. I dug in, did what the docs said, but could not get it working in sandbox mode. Finally, under a time crunch for him and due to schedule tightness on my end, I turned on production mode and everything just worked. End of story. Two days later UPS knocked and I was the accidental owner of some 500 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets I needed to mail back to my friend's client. The only time I've ever had a bug show up in real life at my house.

greglindahl 8y ago

I don't know if people like it or not, but there certainly are a bunch of high-traffic websites that use it... which is how you end up getting purchased by Adobe. Not quite like getting purchased by Oracle, but still.

tomc1985 8y ago

I really wanted to. But Magento is a fucking mess. V2 took a fairly comprehensible API and made it labyrinthine. And don't look to closely at its chosen database schema...

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Magento 2 has been an absolute unmitigated disaster from day 1. We won't touch it now and I know many Magento shops who feel the same way.
- tomc1985 8y ago
  I personally just love the undocumented behavior changes between minor version upgrades.....
- jimnotgym 8y ago
  We pressed on with "M2" and are doing fine with it. The major stumbling blocks I saw for our devs were: 1) Magento sites are normally full of plug-ins. The plug-in eco-system is much less mature for M2. We had to pay to fix a lot of bugs in plugins. 2) The new basket and checkout (for instance) relies much more on client side JavaScript (it saves as you write for instance). Our seasoned Magento devs were inexperienced with that kind of application, after years of working on php server side code only. The rest has been actually a pretty good experience.
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    We have run into a number of issues related to our integrations, the biggest of which was a documented behavior changing completely after a minor version upgrade, which completely broke our shit. (The behavior is that all orders go into "Processing" status after payment clears, regardless of any statuses you may have added and whatever you have set to be default for the 'Processing' superstatus. Doesn't help that the data flow for orders supremely confusing) Also whoever wrote their JS needs to be shot. How it is acceptable to load your HTML buttons in one order and then, at the last second, suddenly switch to the opposite order. It was like all those Hawaii missile warning interface UI memes from a few months ago, except real life.

jacquesm 8y ago

That's true, but it gets the job done. It's like Wordpress (and Wordpress/WooCommerce), nobody loves it but it powers a surprising number of businesses.

cepth 8y ago

As the saying goes, compare Magento to the alternatives, not to the almighty. If you're running an ecommerce operation that is too small to justify building a custom CMS, and can't justify paying for Demandware/Salesforce Commerce Cloud, your options are really limited. Shopify and Big Commerce offer good out of the box functionality, but you are then stuck with their feature sets and pricing tables. Each platform taxes you in various ways. Shopify imposes 0.5-2.0% fees on transactions processed with external credit card processors. Big Commerce forces you to upgrade your plan after your sales exceed a certain threshold. For even ecommerce companies doing several million dollars a year in revenue, Magento community edition (open source) is sufficient. You pay up front for development or design work, pay annual server costs, and can scale your ecommerce technology spend on your schedule. Magento has given me extreme headaches at times, but once we had our site up and running it was easy to maintain and administer. The non-technical people, i.e. the people who are actually packing and shipping orders, quickly picked up using the admin panel. So, yeah, I like Magento just fine.

wila 8y ago
So far the only somewhat sane alternative is prestashop. At least I don't worry what breaks this time on a security update, which is a real PITA with magento. For updates to magento shops I schedule time, for updates to prestashop I press a button..
- cepth 8y ago
  We actually used to run our site off of Prestashop. The biggest reason that I saw to switch was because of the lack of integrations with some of our operations tech stack. For example, Freshdesk has an official extension/add-on for Magento, but on PrestaShop the only add-on is a $39.99 option made by a 3rd party developer. Prestashop is probably easier to administer than Magento, but that comes with tradeoffs because of its smaller developer ecosystem.
  - wila 8y ago
    Understood, it might not fit for every shop. For quite a lot of shops it works quite well though. I guess that it wasn't so much that the add-on came at a cost, but more that it was: a) a 3rd party developer b) the only option As you said it was just one of your issues.

wmeredith 8y ago

Sounds like it will be a fine addition to Adobe’s collection.