Magento is dead – Merchants want a suite of marketing tools, not refactored code (opens in new tab)

>>>Magento is the Drupal of the eCommerce world - relatively prominent, but almost universally reviled by developers and not all that easy to use for users. It's the worst of many worlds.

This a thousand times.

I've used both and as a developer it was incredibly painful to customize either for any specific feature or function. The first time I upgraded Magento, it completely broke the client's site. A nice Sunday afternoon was spent hacking together plugins to fix what the update broke.

Both are horrible to work with and I shudder anytime someone suggests it to me for their ecommerce platform. You'd be better just hiring a .Net developer and have them build you something from scratch.

It is indeed still awful. I know someone who works in Magento and they frequently come to me with genuine WTF bits of code. Added functionality would be a nightmare.

A rewrite is sorely needed, and will help developers who have to work with and on Magento to save their bosses time and money.

Absolutely the worst maze of spaghetti files. To get anything done on one page you had to edit a few different deeply nested partial files. I hated working on it.

That's not the way the small businesses that use Magento think. They want one, all-singing all-dancing tool that does everything they could ever imagine wanting. And they never want to update it or maintain it or have to think about it.

I 100% agree with this.

I honestly think Magento should basically drop almost every core 'feature' and just become a rock-solid platform to build upon.

Strongly agree that this is ludicrously hostile to devs. This statement here:

"This is how developers keep themselves employed: by regularly clusterfucking your code."

Ummm, no. This is what happens when feature requirements are poorly communicated over a long period of time, combined with implementing every half baked or ill advised feature asked for by the marketing team. You know, stuff like "automated SEO using artificial intelligence".

I have worked on Magento, and agree that it is painful and convoluted, but it's a bit hard to believe that every single dev that has contributed to it was either stupid and/or malicious. Hopefully, moving to a community driven approach on 2.0 will actually clean up some of the technical debt and make the product more reliable, although it's more likely that it's just going to result in future feature adds coming from more numerous stakeholders with conflicting visions.

Hopefully the Magento management can manage all that input and stay focused. What they absolutely need to ignore is misguided and obviously clueless (or even malicious) feedback like this article.

Yeah, seriously. The entitlement. My favorite was

> automated SEO using artificial intelligence;

Indeed, he should just shut up and program all of that himself and put the source code on github. He, without developers slowing him down he's probably finished in a week....

I don't think anybody would disagree that Magento has a pretty healthy learning curve. Additionally, there are too many companies out in the world who are just looking for the cheapest developer that they can find. This combination creates a huge problem. I would venture to guess that most weekend PHP developers think that they are capable of developing in Magento. I mean, do you think you can take on any new PHP project and figure out how to make it work? While some may have skills to do such, it is the large marjority that do not have the drive, desire, or knowledge to do this the right way. In the end, it is this group of people who are giving others in the Community a bad name. They hack Mage code, lack even basic development skills, and leave projects in an even worse position than when they started. The Magento community can only do so much in education and help. Additionally, Magento recognized that this was a huge problem and started providing training with Magento U. While this may not be cost effective for every developer in the world, at least Magento has acknowledged that this need exists and continues to provide training and new programs on an ongoing basis. TLDR, Magento is complex, and complex systems are not meant for every developer in the world. Pick your developers wisely and they will not burn you with bad code. Magento representation in 26% of the market sure does not seem dead to me.

Of course not, it's just silly developers creating spaghetti code to keep themselves in business /s

Each time I had to do a Magento (CE) site I fantasized about doing a concurrent platform.

But I know better than to think one average dev like me can do that so instead I just vow to never work on a e-commerce site again.

FWIW Magento or Prestashop can really make you a very decent e-commerce site quickly and cheaply. Hard to really complain when they offer free versions.

But still, Magento can sometimes calculate VAT wrong (among other things) ! You would thought being an e-commerce platform it would at least not screw that.

Is it going to use a similar scheme after the rewrite?

It was probably running on Magento.

> So again, like before Magento, there is a huge market potential for ecommerce software that offers the right marketing tools.

I agree 100% . The question is on what plateform and language should it be written (to be successfull) ?

I wish this was how the lion's share of articles were re-aggregated. Thanks

The problem with Magento, like so many other OSS eCommerce platforms, is that of extensibility (or lack thereof), and the ensuing technical debt.

We've been making eCommerce solutions (not just sites - CRM, warehouse management, analytics, lots and lots of marketing tools) for nearly a decade now. We started out with OsC, played with Magento, and saw, 8 years ago, that the strategy of these platforms was, well, broken.

How? Well. Let's consider the typical scenario. Joe sells kites. Joe wants a website that helps him sell kites. Magento looks like it does what he wants, as it's got a cart and all that stuff. Joe finds a contractor who looks good, and has decent references from his current clients. They start work. Part way through the build, Joe realises that he wants to sell custom-printed kites, and to do this, he needs to take a deposit, and then charge the customer the balance. "Uh-oh", thinks the developer, "I'm on fixed costs, and there's no plugin for that. The architecture is a nightmare... screw it, I'll just chuck it in the core and worry about it later". Joe is happy, as his site does what he needs it to, and the developer is happy because he got paid.

Six months later, Joe reads about a security update, and wants to apply it. His developer sucks his teeth, and applies it, manually re-patching in his previous hack, because making a plugin is hard, m'kay (never mind that in many scenarios, you can't make a plugin to make whatever you need to happen, happen). Joe wants another addition, and another hack is born.

This cycle continues for a while, until the developer fears looking at Joe's code-base, and Joe is pissed off that everything takes a long time, and that upgrades can't be done/take forever, because the developer is having to re-implement, and re-implement, and re-implement, rather than move forwards.

The other side of this is that a magento install will run a magento site - not ten, not two on different databases, and no mix-and-match of either, meaning that you end up with a whole bunch of code-bases, many of which differ, even if you're a shop exclusively running magento for your N clients.

It's not clear who Magento is built for. It's not for developers, as it's painful to work with... it's not for the end user, as the front-end experience is so-so at best, and again, hard to customise without screwing up upgradability... and it's definitely not for the merchant, as it's featureless, barren, slow, and ultimately expensive to run.

So what we did was build an eCommerce platform where everything is extensible and overridable. Core method doesn't quite do what you want? Not a problem, write a client-specific one, just keep your interfaces consistent, and you won't break maintainability. You can upgrade the core with impunity. You can hang as many sites as you can grind out off a single install. We deploy continuously.

As a result, we've been able to focus on building features marketeers and merchandisers want, by being able to build something once, respond quickly to market and client demands, and roll it out widely with minimal effort - rather than being stuck on the terminal treadmill of broken upgrade paths.