Pocket Revolutionary

Magento, the new open source shopping cart in town, is officially in an open beta now! I’ve been using FishCart for shopping carts ever since I worked on the core development team, and I still love it. There are certain things that I believe have to be open source for me to use them as a developer, mainly my shopping cart and my CMS; I end up needing to tweak both for every project in some way. So, I love FishCart because it’s not only open source, but I’ve been using it for so many years that I know where everything is.

So, what’s the deal with Magento? Well, it may be the only shopping cart to draw me away from FishCart. With the amount of edits and rewrites I do per project, I’ve been wanting something built with a strong PHP5/MVC framework and I want AJAX and other little toys built in. I’m not much of a Javascript developer, and I don’t like spending too much time adding JS libraries to all my projects. I really want a cart with a lot of the front-end sexiness already in place, and I just want to be able to modify the core enough to add payment options or add new extensions like a registration system. Anyway, I’ve been playing with Magento since it came out last weekend, and it’s got a lot of what I want. If you download the beta, it comes complete with a dummy package with products, categories, a default template, and an example of almost all of the current functionality. The only huge thing it’s missing right now for ministries is the most important thing, though: donations. I’ve already mentioned it to them on the developer forum and they seemed to listen, but I would recommend that anybody else interested go ahead and bug them about it some more

I don’t like changing shopping carts like I don’t like changing CMSes… they both took too long to learn and they both have all of my data safely organized in their database structures. In this case, though, I may be willing to take the risk, and I’d recommend anybody else look at Magento as well. The developers have been working on osCommerce installations for years, so they know what works (and what really, really doesn’t) in open source shopping carts. Maybe, in the spirit of open source, we can all come together, osCommerce and FishCart lovers, to have a real third option!