Does anybody use Magento for their site or have any experience with Magento?

why do you ask?

Because I am now using Magento for my site and wondered if anyone had any experience with it as I am new to the software and still picking it up. It would be useful if there was someone I could speak to about the software

Right, only that's a techy question so this thread will be moved to computer & tech chat.


Meantime, search for magento in Google and you should find forums covering it, for all the FAQs.

After getting bored with how OSCommerce & Zencart look I had a go at Magento last autumn-ish. I came away with the impression that it's buggy as hell, absolute murder to re-skin (you can buy themes, all of which seemed to be ridiculously expensive), & support was about the worst of any free site package I've ever seen, when you could get any at all. If it installs OK, doesn't give you any problems & you're OK with the default theme then good luck to you, if you have any problems after a few weeks/months when you're relying on it then it may start getting very expensive unless you're Mr uber-php-geek. Of course that was last year, so they may've sorted everything out by now, but I seriously doubt it & frankly I'd never touch it again.

A decent list of Ecommerce site packages with demos & ratings here (http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/show.php?catid=3&cat=eCommerce), take some of the ratings with a pinch of salt, but some of the comments (on Magento especially) will let you know what you've let yourself in for.

thanks for the reply steev,

I did a bit of research between OSCommerce, Zencart, Magento and others, and came to the conclusion that Magento was the best one I was looking for.

It's now a stable release as appose to the beta version they may of had last year and I haven't had many problems with it as of yet. I do admit it can be quite hard to get to grips with and when I do bump into any problems the support can be limited, but I'm impressed with it nonetheless. The php side of it wasn't that bad, I mean I do have some experience with php but nothing special, if you follow the tutorials carefully I found that I was alrite with it.

My sites now made with Magento anyway and it looks a lot more professional than before and I'm pretty used to it now, although I have been struggling to find help with the merchant gateways on it and whats the best merchant gateway to use.

Does anybody have any experience with using merchant gateways? Internal form based?