Magento – My New Best Friend and Worst Enemy
If you have not yet heard of it yet then I shall give you a quick heads up. Magento is a open source ecommerce solution from Varien. It has become one of the most talked about solutions on the web for being one of the best ecommerce solutions around to one of the biggest pains in the backside ever.
Magento is in my opnion one of the most powerful solutions out there offering an amazing array of options, product types and payment gateways (including Paypal, WorldPay, Protox and a whole host of third party gateways). There is also a lot of third party support for plugins or modules which is good, as long as these will do what the client needs it to do.
I have written a few custom blocks and played about with adding some custom functionality to themes and it does seem like a lot of code just to add some more filters to make the end users experience easier, these in admission have taken me a lot longer than I had anticipated to code due complete random methods, classes (Although i am sure Zend developers will tell me otherwise). In truth it is a solution built by not your bedroom PHP developer but by OOP purists, so if you dont know OOP or have no knowledge of Zend, good bloody luck.
Conclusion theming is easy programming for it not so. Magento is a great ecommerce solution that really could become huge that if it does what the client needs in its base form there is nothing better to theme for.
Try before you sell it.