It’s been a particularly great few weeks for Zend Framework. Not only did we release both 1.5 and 1.5.1 (stay tuned for a 1.5.2 soon), Magento 1.0 is based on ZF 1.5.1- in fact they redistribute ZF in their packages. Indeed the Magento 1.0 release was nearly as exciting for us as the ZF 1.5 release. Big congrats to the people at Varien for their first production release of Magento!

,Wil

Hi Wil, thanks for stopping in to comment on my rather trivial post

ZF is a great, great piece of web engineering, and it has made my job a lot easier on a several occasions already. I think the design decisions made on ZF mirror some of the best thinking in software development, while keeping PHP’s strengths of being lightweight and flexible.

Honestly, as a developer, I’m a bit disappointed with the direction Magento went. It’s been an incredible undertaking, and they did an equally incredible job of providing tons of functionality out of the box, but customizing a storefront is not quite as simple as I had hoped. I feel that the Magento team may have gotten a little overzealous in their desire for modularity, and put in a few too many layers of abstraction. This is my opinion, but having configuration data in XML layouts, PHP templates and classes, and in the database makes it difficult to diagnose how Magento is compiling pages and providing functionality. Perhaps it’s just the lack of up to date developer documentation, but I wish that the Magento codebase was a bit more explicit about where data and objects were being pulled from. As is, the learning curve is a bit steeper than I expected from a ZF based app. Philip Greenspun has expressed what I’m feeling pretty well.

Of course, you don’t see me writing up any wiki articles, so take that with a grain of salt Magento is a huge step up from Web 1.0 eCommerce packages, so I’m sure all my complaints will be addressed as it matures.