There’s no question that Magento is becoming (some say it already has) the open source ecommerce platform of choice. However, we all know that nothing is perfect. So we’d like to know what’s your biggest Magento pet peeve? Is it too complex? Is it hard to find a good theme? Is it too slow? Whatever it is, share your thoughts here. Visit site Free Geo IP only return geolocation data and has none of the enriched data that other providers offer.
Who knows, maybe we can alleviate your pet peeve with some simple advice!
I’ll follow this up next week by asking what you like most about Magento.
It’s very very difficult to theme and customise layout and there’s no straightforward documentation or tutorials for standard tasks. I must say it’s pretty demoralising, every day there’s a new hurdle. My problem of the moment is trying to make a product quick view page…what a nightmare it’s becoming…
I too am trying to create a product quickview on category pages. I am hopong to get it running using jquery. The feature I am trying to simulate is on http://www.ae.com and http://www.mossejaw.com.
It’s tough to learn from a designers stand point. Creating themes and layouts isn’t simple… and the lack of documentation doesn’t help 🙂
@Philip, I hear ya. Creating themes for Magento is a challenge, even more is the implementation of those themes (in order to do something that’s scalable and won’t break with future upgrades). What I’ve found to help is to document all of Magento’s native functionality and taking associated screenshots. Having that organized in a document can at least help the designers think of all the different aspects they need to design for.
Great tip, Erik! and just in the nick of time… about to start a fresh Magento install (hopefully with minimal hacking) 🙂 Can you recommend any resources other then the magneto website? I’ve seen Exploremagento.com, but other then that I haven’t seen many places to get Magento Tips / Tircks.
@Philip, actually there are very few social networks out there with this kind of help. I think your best bet is to stay involved with the Magentocommerce.com forums. They’re very active and have lots of good information.
We actually hired Elias to develop our eCommerce website http://www.keramikoskitchen.com using the Magento platform.
Our comments are the same as the other comments on here… it’s not simple to change the design and themes on Magento as just a regular user. Hiring a qualified developer for Magento is also pretty difficult as it’s such a new system and there aren’t as many experienced developers out there as with a system like http://www.oscommerce.com or other systems that have been out there longer.
That being said… Magento is still a very new (and very huge) system. It will take a while and a few more releases before the system is fully documented and there is a stable base of qualified programmers, designers and developers to work with.
Some great Magento samples are available here >> http://www.design4magento.com
So far we are loving working with Elias and they have put forward a great design for our new site. We should be live within the next few weeks so you can all see our new store for yourselves.
I’ll agree that even with the screencasts and guides Magento/Varient Posted I could instantly tell the designer or HTML/CSS monkey’s didn’t have much say in the structure. It was the Programmers who overly structured the templating system. It takes me atleast 5-7 folders to follow through JUST to get to a folder to upload images, edit a CSS file or even modify the templates themselves. I understand the needs for this sort of thing with Magento’s complex backend functionality but there is such a thing as being to Organized it slows down development processes. I believe the saying goes if your desk isn’t messy your not being very productive!
What I did was take a good base template to start with and started deconstructing the internal workings as much as I could grasp at the time to learn more of how Magento is building the pages up. This was before a lot of the community was asking for a very basic stripped down template that we could use as a base for creating new templates. I believe you can find it on MagentoConnect.
There is also a nifty feature that is somewhat hidden in Magento’s Admin that will display the Block controllers and the actual .phtml file that make up any page you are looking at. You can find this under the Admin area -> System -> Configuration. Select the “Current Configuration Scope:” to the left. <- This is an important step to get to this feature. After you have selected the Store of your choice proceed to the “Developer” Subsection to the left you’ll notice a “Template Path Hints” field with a drop down to enable/disable it. Coming from X-Cart and utilizing Smarty’s Debug Console popup to find template files and variables used I found this most useful feature for designers.
Templates are a headache but try extending the code base with notepad.exe You’ll quickly become overwhelmed with Magento/Varien OOP Voodoo, and PHP docs as nice is it is still doesn’t cut the mustard of someone really documenting methods, attributes, classes, etc. like most other great API’s especially from Google or PHP themselves.
Eventually I found it was time to get a more up-to-date IDE and decided to go with ZendStudio, and I haven’t looked back, the code completion was Exactly what I was missing coming from Micro$ofts Visual Studio. I believe others are also using Eclipse as an IDE to extend Magento more easily.
The other gripe I have with Magento is its speed, its defiantly a luxury car and not some sports car! I know Magento has mentioned improving the speed in future versions as one of their main focuses but for now we are left with server tweaks and hardware upgrades to make things run smoother. I believe I read somewhere that some pages can take as much as 20mb of the servers memory to generate if its not cached.
Besides all of these items I am all for Magento and think its simply the best E-Commerce package to date. I’ve used quite a few in the past and all lacked in features or were a PITA to upgrade!
…and since I typed a novel I’m gonna post this up on my blog as well, love the topics here and subscribed to Elias’s RSS feeds!
For me it’s just the speed. I’m getting to grips with the lack of documentation, and am using the forums a hell of a lot – I’m even managing to make my own modules now – but it’s such a pain when you’re doing 1000 page refreshes daily to test things and it takes anything up to a minute to refresh! This definitely makes a difference though for anyone else getting a bit sick of it – http://inchoo.net/ecommerce/magento/boost-the-speed-of-your-magento/