System Requirements
Magento is based on LAMP which stands a short form for Linux Apache MySQL and PHP. At point it may worked for WAMP which replaces Linux with windows but its not recommended. As a language platform Magento looks for PHP 5.2 and above and won’t settle below that. If your host is running older versions of PHP then you should double check. Industry standard hosting such as 1and1 have both PHP4 and PHP5 available on the servers however it needs a little
tweaking to activate 5.2 on the hosting package. Rest all requirements are pretty standard such as MySQL 4.1.2 or newer and should be available readily with most of companies. It may sound straight requirements if you can work around with few more mandatory configuration on your lampbox. Please do not compare the system requirements of Magento same as wordpress or joomla since they are not. Magento needs PDO_MySQL and DG Extensions installed and working fine with the configurations. On Average half of our initial time while working with Magento clients got wasted contacting hosting companies and asking them to get these things in place. If you or your client has good ole small niche hosting company then you will be forgetting them sooner. Even if your hosting company gives you some workarounds you can still land up in soup after a while. There is no option to but go with hosting either what they recommend or the companies you know better.The Installation
If you get PHP working fine with dozens of required installations of extensions (At point they are pretty much there but if they aren’t then you are just watching red screen for many hours until hosting company replies.) While you may be under impression that the installations are as easy as other open sourrce softwares such as wordpress or joomla then forget. In order to get Magento installed properly one needs to know hosting in far details as well little bit of Unix. Magento may demand for a SSH access as well doing some task at the shell level. If you think I just talked gibberish then you are the one who will be staring at problematic screens for longer timings. Unlike other Opensource software Magneto asks you to install the database first and then run the file installers. The database dump is available separately when you download the installation and huge 9.8 MB in the size. Importing the whole SQL file to Database may fail in first tries. What we did is ran table by table queries and got it installed. Once done with the databases you will run the file installation and first thing you have to play is your .htaccess file. If you haven’t heard about this file before then you may ran into another trivial situations. For those who know .htaccess files thoroughly it’s a moderate easy job. You will need to set file permissions for various files and that should be easy job if you are using a good ftp program such as filezilla. If things goes well you will land up to the database connection page which let you connect and make the system live. For people who have spent time on ecommerce right from the days of osCommerce the installation and configuration should go successful mostly. Note the osCommerce knowledge is usefull only in order to understand your hosting environment and not Magento. For the matter of fact you may need to forget what you learnt at other carts and treat Magento as your new snack. Truffles can be better than sausages for sure. The only thing you wont know much about truffles and that's where the adventure begins
Features
Magento has more features than any other cart out there what we know. Its just Feature Packed software. If you are really about to use those for better business then you should go ahead. If you read something that you never thought and ecommerce system needs or never gone that deep in dreams of an excellent system then go elsewhere instead of the whole big struggle. Magento even integrates with SAP. (You can guess by now that QuickBooks integration should be just piece of cake). But if you have never seen any screens of SAP in life and QuickBooks integration is max you needed then well your options are pretty open for other carts too.
Some of the standard features you may find with other carts too are here
- Multi-Lingual
- Support for localization
- Support for multiple currencies
- Batch Import and Export of catalog
- Media Manager with automatic image resizing and watermarking
- Cross-sells, Up-sells and Related Items
- Recently viewed products
- Product comparisons
- Multiple Images Per Product
- One-Page Checkout as well Saved Shopping Carts with configurable expiration time
- On-site order tracking from customer accounts
- Integrations with most of the leading payment processors
- View, edit, create and fulfill orders from admin panel.
- Downloadable Products
- Feature-rich Customer Accounts
We have talked here some of the standard features apart from basic systems what any shopping cart should have. If we look at the list we can guess that Magento will do most/all of what is expected by standard shopping cart. Few of the special features of Magento has are available with far less carts out there in the cloud and at point only with Magento. Those involves something
- Control multiple websites and stores from one Administration Panel with ability to share as much or as little information as needed
- Auto-Generated Popular Search Terms Page
- Multi-Tier Pricing for quantity discounts
- Web Services API for easy integration between Magento and any third-party application
- Google Website Optimizer Integration for A/B and Multivariate Testing
- Create Store-specific attributes on the fly
- Layered / Faceted Navigation for filtering of products in Categories
- Ability to assign designs on category and product level (unique design per product/category)
- Product listing in grid or list format
- Product Image Zoom-in Capability
- Multi-Tier Pricing Up sell
- Accept gift messages per order and per item
- Multiple shipments per order
- Call Center (phone) order creation
- Order History with Status Updates
Extra Advantages
While paid enterprise version does extra magic the community supported version is magical enough too. Magento has pleasant web 2.0 possibilities with the shopping experience and makes shopping experience a little better than other carts out there. Magento also has many extensions available which makes scaling sites for few specific needs more than a box and currently has got good number of extensions. Magento also has got integration capability with many of the industry standard suites and apps so getting magento onboard for a reputed organization can be performed in the same discipline what those integrated softwares has.
Design
Magento has fully customizable template capability. Now we know many of the cart do have that nowadays however you have to be far brilliant in design as well should be able to browse multiple files here and there in distributed page hierarchy to get advantage of that. But the good news is there are many many good free as well paid templates available for this and you can setup a fantastic site which neighbors will envy. (Those who rank below and above your site in search engines.)
SEO
For any of the reviews of this site we generally see demo URLs of the official cart installation and try to trace how they are ranking for demo product. Magento’s Demo URL ranks pretty well for the product names they have used such as Impatience T-Shirt or Nine West Lucero Pump. Note that we just took real products which do exist on internet and then compared. Additionally Magento has got very good URL structure for the product. Controlling every single URL of the products will be everyone's dream however that isn’t possible with Magento. But it's not that easy with others either
Pros
Rich in functions, does the basic job perfect and advance job perfect too if you are ready to unlearn your set mind with other carts and go in far details of this one.
Cons
Not good enough for small business owners on shared hosting for performance. Its just Slows down, there needs a big deal of a brain and at point gives feelings to leave it altogether for many small and midsize businesses (This is real scary feeling)
Overall
You need to be object oriented PHP expert to go for this one.
If you are outsourcing your Magento Solution to some other country you will need to be careful a lot apart from geo politics. Go with developers you know since year and be patient with solutions
If you are developing for Magento get a good IDE. Dreamweaver or Frontpage (what is that?) wont do. Additionally you need to gain expertise over zend framework.
We feel it is a little tricky to work with community version though its open source we see many many unanswered threads there. A clear reason behind this is the enterprise version revenue model has set. Keeping one version free and an enterprise version of same has always created conflicts. It's just not natural for the open source model.