History: We
do a lot of client projects for E-commerce using our rental e-commerce solution
Sales Igniter. We started in 2002 using Oscommerce which was then the go to
open source E-commerce system in PHP. We used that for 5 years, but were very
disappointed in how the Oscommerce source code was not maintained much, it
stayed pretty much the same. Many clients wanted extra features and
contributions added to their site, so what we found was that contributions were
many times full of bugs and conflicted with one another.
So in 2008 we started off on developing our own
E-commerce framework. Our goal was to create something where
client customizations could be kept separate from our source
code. Because if you are a developer, you know that clients will ask for some
pretty crazy stuff and it doesn't make sense to put it into the base. For our
new framework we used Doctrine ORM to make it easier to work with the database.
We developed our own custom overwrite system so that client code would not
interfere with our main rental software framework.
Being a smaller company, we found that it became way
too time consuming to maintain our own E-commerce framework. We had
also experimented building our own WYSIWYG visual template manager
for the design portion of Sales Igniter. This was a big time hole for us as
there were some issues with loosing sessions and sometimes the template code
getting lost as a template was saved. We began to realize that this was not the
way to go and began to investigate other solutions. We considered going to Ruby
on Rails and using the Spree shopping cart. We also considered all of the top
PHP shopping carts: Prestashop, Magento, Open Cart, Tomato Cart, CS Cart, and Virtuemart.
http://www.itwebexperts.com/oscommerce_zencart_xcart_comparison.php
The problem was we were spending
95% of our time on maintaining the shopping cart and 5% of our time developing
and improving the rental portion which is way out of balance. We were no longer
able to run a profitable business because of this imbalance. So though it
pained us we knew something had to be done and we’d have to move to another
framework. After considering all of these options we decided on Magento for the
following reasons:
1. Largest number of available extensions of any of the open source
shopping carts for adding things like gift certificates, caching (speed
improvement), analytics, advanced customer groups, ebay/amazon integration, points
and rewards, design templates and mobile device templates, shipping &
payment modules, Social Integrations, and more.
2. Magento has an excellent overwrite system built-in for adding
extensions like our rental system. This prevents other modules from
interfering with your extension and breaking it when you add others.
3. International Language Support is part of the rails framework. You
don't want to know how many hours we spent building onto and enhancing the
languages feature in our PHP rental solution. We had it using XML files,
translating these dynamically in Google Translate API and then storing these
and then built an editor so clients could put in better translations for where
Google Translate didn't really do it right. Well that time hole is now gone.
4. Encourages correct coding methods MVC. A problem
probably all web development companies run into with their employees is that
they get lazy and start hardcoding things, putting code in the wrong
directories, and your codebase will start to get junked up. Magento actually
makes it easier to code the right way from the start - so your programmers will
be encouraged to code the right way from the start.
5. QA & Unit
Testing support is built-in. QA is a huge pain. If you add even a simple
thing to an app, maybe it will break some obscure thing elsewhere in your
system. Well Magento solves that by having a great way to add test code
built-in. It doesn't take long to learn how to do and is standard.
6. Excellent cache and index system built-in
to the core for great speed. Caching is very important to any modern web
app as there are over 10,000 files and huge database arrays which can clog up
the cpu of any server no matter how powerful it is if you don’t use proper
caching and indexing.
Please checkout our rental e-commerce shopping cart and see what you think. A free 30 day trial is available.
