… that gets no help/attention from Magento/Varien in anyway.
[COLOR=“Lime”]HELLO… PLEASE DONT REPLY HERE, I STARTED A WHOLE NEW THREAD ABOUT THE TOPIC… PLEASE REPLY THERE…
THANK YOU [/COLOR]
everyone seems to either prefer ZenCart or Magento…
i use ZC at the moment, have thought about trying Magento but i think i will wait for a year, see how it progresses… (dont want to buy a VPS just to play on)
does anyone have any experience of Prestashop…
i would love to hear from those with experience of Zencart 1.3.8a and Prestashop 1.0.0.8… which is better to use at the front & backend, faster, easier to skin… what’s the community like, etc…
you know the score
cheers
M
I’ve worked with OsCommerce, Zen Cart, X-Cart. Out of all of them i would have recommended x-cart but as of recently, since X-cart released their 4.2 version - it seems that upgrading to their coming release of 4.3 and v5 is not going to be easy for people who started with 4.1.
As a result i thought the only other alternatives were volusion or netsuite - which were both out of my budget. (as a preference - i’d rather have a solution i can host rather than going hosted).
Then i stumbled upon Magento.
I am totally sold on this thing except for 1 issue that has been mentioned by countless other people - the performance. Something has to change in this area.
If this issue gets resolved it will be the #1 small to medium sized business ecommerce solution within 1 year.
Magento is to Ecommerce what MODX is to CMS.
I’ve worked with Miva, Magento, and OSC - never ZenCart. OSC is hard to manage and practically dead. Magento is nice, but a resource hog, and the community seems hard to get information from - not sure if they are closed off or not knowledgable, I couldn’t tell.
Miva Merchant stumbled in the past when they were purchased by FindWhat. But it’s a very robust system with lots of features and an open API. Granted it’s not open source or PHP, so if you want to extend it, you have two options: buy modules, or learn to program in MivaScript. The documentation is limited but available; the community is wonderful and you can get lots of help on the forums (extranet.mivamerchant.com). Plus, since it’s compiled, it is more secure than some carts whose code has been dug through and holes exposed, patched, more found and exposed, etc.
I definitely think you’d want to give Miva Merchant a look.
While Miva Merchant runs on MivaScript, it is completely customizable at every screen. One can export/import any data for the store (via import tools or to/from the database files directly).
In my experience (and I’ve worked with hundreds of shopping carts over the past 12 years, and Miva Merchant is the most expandable.
Pamela
Right now I am using ZenCart. In my opinion zencart is a good solution for e-commerce. There is huge base with free add-on developed by active community members.
I have played with all three now and i have to say i picked Zen Cart as the tool of choice…
Hasnt let me down at all…
wont give Magento a 2nd thought… no point, it is just no where near as good
I’m absolutely agree with these statements. :tup:
it was the community of zen cart that was the final deciding factor for me. of the 170+ post i have made, about 3 have gone unanswered. Of the 10 posts i made in the magento community, 1 got answered.
Also, ZC has so many features built in and free that Magento either dont have, or is only available in the Enterprise edition, which is how much?.. 10k or something stupid…?
Didn’t Magento improve on the whole “resources hog” part recently? I don’t know anything about their community, so I can’t comment on this but I totally disagree about “OSC is hard to manage and practically dead…” comment.
If it was that dead, there wouldn’t be millions of sites using it
and 100s of development and design companies - ourselves included - would practically be out of work, but we are not.
So it’s definitely not dead.
…the site in my signature is a magento site. Provided the server is configured correctly its not too bad, gzip and minify help massively.
At the moment its not a system you could run with shared hosting but v1.4 is likely to fix that, i tried out the alpha version and its MUCH better.
Magento are slow, because mage core is rather heavy, besides they use zend framework.
Try to use the magento compiler:
It is still a beta version, but it could make your store a little bit faster.
Is that bad to your mind?
They use too many preg_match functions.
I think that there is no way to optimize the slow Zend Framework in code.
I believe there are known ways to make Zend Framework work faster, and they are shared over the net.
What about Zend speed, yes, all frameworks have some issues with performance. PHP itself could be considered slow if to compare with Java for example 
As for Magento, then most likely performance issues are caused by the code/system structure.
Yes, for example you can purchase Zend Server.
Magento works excellent on it.
I don’t understand how Miva Merchant was included in this thread. Magento, osCommerce and Zen Cart are all open source (PHP based) shopping carts. Miva Merchant is a closed source, compiled, shopping cart based on their proprietary language understood only by a select few.
Magento: The biggest complain people have is that it is bloated and slow. If you have a dedicated server (like any ecommerce shop should) and do the performance tweaks like Magento recommends, this shouldn’t be an issue. Granted their core isn’t easy to hack (gasp it forces you to write modules instead), it seems like there are extensions available to do quite a bit.
osCommerce: Its dead. Anyone who says differently is selling something. Yes, there are a lot of sites using it, but the software itself is dead. OsCommerce has been in a release candidate alpha build since Jan-2008 (coming on two years now), and their attempt to create 3.0 seems futile. If you go this route, you WILL have to get your hands dirty. If you are not a PHP developer, you will either have to rent one or become one quickly. The modules you buy are not modules but rather instructions on how to hack the core code. I guess the good news here is that you don’t have to worry about updates breaking your hacks because there are no updates…
ZenCart: I’ve never used it so I can’t comment. Just looked at their 2.0 roadmap (http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=75264) though and this statement would scare me off
productPricing and product Factory classes added – saves 700+ queries on home page alone
You mean currently there are 700+ queries on the home page? Pass.
2 BrandonK: really great review And really reasonable I would say!
Here i Vote for Magneto & zencart
…and I really really can not believe what I am reading here.
X-cart, who are you? Are you the company owner? employee? paid forum poster? My bad, I must have missed your intro.