Re: [chiPHPug-discuss] PHP / Magento Job

[Keith C. <mai...@ca...>]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Arlo Leach <ar...@ar...> wrote:
> I guess I should add "difficulty in finding more developers experienced with
> that software" as an additional caveat to clients considering such systems.
> A few years ago it seemed like every craigslist ad wanted someone
> experienced with Smarty templates; then it was Drupal; maybe Magento will be
> the next system whose popularity exceeds the available knowledge base.

Part of the problem with Magento is that it's a hairy beast, has only
been around for a year-18 months, and is billed as a perfect system
that you can have off the ground in a matter of hours... when in
reality, you're looking at days, if not weeks of work. One of my guys
has been writing an analysis of it for the past few months -
http://blueparabola.com/category/general/magento - and has elicited
some criticism from Varien's CTO.  Varien is the company behind
Magento.

Part of the problem is that it's *sort* of an Open Source project...
sure, it's unencrypted PHP and you can edit it to your heart's
content.  Yes, there is a community around it writing patches and
submitting/sharing them.  The problem is tha their repository isn't
available for public review so major things break between minor
versions and no one knows until it's released.  Further, you don't
know which patches and contributions have been included because their
changelogs are borderline worthless.  Finally, they have a wiki with
user-generated docs and tips, but there's no "blessings" on any of the
pages saying "yes, this is considered the best way" or any effort to
identify which versions the instructions apply to... combined with the
"breaking stuff between minor versions" point, this makes it painful
at best.

And fyi, my guy teaches the Magento class for php|architect... so he's
generally pretty clueful on it.

My 0.02,
keith

-- 
D. Keith Casey Jr.
CTO, Blue Parabola, LLC
http://BlueParabola.com
http://CaseySoftware.com/blog