Why I’ll never recommend or use Magento again. Ever.
// June 21st, 2010 // No Comments » // Work
Magento, when it came out, was the Holy Grail of shopping carts. It was feature loaded, free, and was backed by a physical company. Two years ago, before I started my current job, the previous web developer chose Magento for the new company website. He then abruptly left, I was hired, and I had to pick up the slack. I’ve heard of Magento before I started working with it, although I didn’t have much knowledge about it. I was pretty stoked about working with it. However, once I started working with it, my feelings changed from “yay” to “awww crap”. I immediately noticed that while it was powerful, it was painfully slow and it would take a ton of work to make it an automotive based site. Tons of money and two years later, boy I was sure right.
The first few months of development were painstaking. It took 15 to 20 seconds for each page load, stuff timed out all the time, and it probably gave me stomach ulcers. The marketing manager and myself would joke that the server must be in a third world country. We approached the boss about moving to a different solution. Between the marketing manager and me, we knew it wasn’t the right solution but the boss wanted to keep on moving forward with it. If we would have moved when we could, we could have saved ourselves THOUSANDS of dollars and around a year of development.
Over the course of the next year, we had several setbacks, but those weren’t Magento’s fault (for the most part…). Since we had to highly modify Magento for our purposes, it’s very finicky and temperamental. It’s like driving a NASCAR at 180mph which is being held together by duct tape and fairy dust. Don’t brake too hard, don’t try to change anything, and don’t try to go any faster. Just cruise where you are at unless you want to spend more time and more money fixing something.
So here we are today. Two years have passed since I was hired. Magento has been the bane of my existence. Everyday I’m reminded that I joined a cult that I can’t get out of and the only way would be to drink the magical cool aid and to catch-a-ride on a nearby comet.
If I had to describe Magento, it’d be something like this: You ever see the show where a person is bungie corded to a wall and they have to run as hard and as fast as they can from the wall? Imagine that, but doing it in knee high sand…. while on fire, bleeding from your eyes, and having broken ankles. No matter what we wanted to, no matter how hard we pushed, Magento held us back.
My thought is that the only place Magento would excel would be a clothing store. In fact, it’s pretty evident that the core of the web app is built around that idea. On the other hand its complete rubbish as an automotive website. Magento has come a long way in two years. It’s not nearly as slow and buggy. However, the community edition (which is what we are using) will never be PA-DSS certified. In fact, not even the package that STARTS at $13k is PA-DSS certified. Do yourself a favor and unless you are starting a clothing store, pass Magento and look at other solutions.
