Magento - Open Source e-commerce

An open source project I’m very excited about is Magento, a new e-commerce package. E-commerce was one of the very first application domains that was tackled when the web starting becoming popular in the mid to late Nineties. There are many, many commercial packages that are available, and correspondingly, there are a few free open source varieties as well. Probably the most widely used are OSCommerce and Zen Cart. Zen Cart actually began as a fork off the main development of OSCommerce. Unfortunately, most problems that have been solved don’t get a second look until the original solutions are held together with duct tape and string. While both codebases were robust when introduced, they originated over 4 years ago, and have been victims of questionable architecture decisions.

While setting up a default online storefront is fairly simple with both applications, customizing the interface or extending them with custom functionality is quite challenging. Many extensions require administrators to edit core files as part of the installation files. As you can imagine, this is a risky proposition. I’ve built storefronts in the past using Zen Cart, but I never want to EVER AGAIN.

Magento is being built from the ground up with the Zend Framework by Varien, a leader in e-commerce development, so chances are that:

• the default functionality will be sufficient for 90% of storefront applications
• implementing custom behavior will be possible via standard architecture conventions
• the core will be updated/maintained regularly

Version 1.0 is due out later this summer (I’ve heard comments about late July/early August), so I’m eagerly awaiting the change to dig into it, and replace some Zen Cart installs.