About Magento

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Published on Monday, 23 January 2012 21:12
Written by Administrator
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Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform created by Varien, built using the Zend PHP Framework.  It uses the very popular MySQL as a backend database.  We are excited to use Magento eCommerce platform as our main software of choice to build medium and large scale on line businesses, Magento is designed and built from the ground up.  By making use of the Zend Framework the object-oriented code allows for easy development and scalability.

Since launching Magento in March 2008, the Community Edition has seen a really rapid development path and todays stable version, 1.3.4.2, has a huge list of features all of which work straight out of the box.  If the core features aren’t enough for you there’s over 1,700 extensions which can be installed via the Magento-Connect interface.  Magento-Connect is integrated in to the backoffice (admin area) and allows you to quickly and easily install extensions with no fuss.  For a full list of extensions see the Magento-Connect page.  In a future episode we’ll cover this topic in greater detail.

 

what features does Magento have?

the list is both extensive and impressive for something that’s free.  for a full list of features refer to the features list.  one of the many selling points for me was the ability to have one hosting package, one installation of magento, but be able to create multiple websites and store fronts.  this reduces cost and administration time considerably.  other notable features include:
• installation and administration: easy to use `browser user interface` (bui) allows you to control every aspect of the front and backends
• extensions: ability to install extensions (plugins) via the bui quickly and easily
• theme support: you can install ready-made themes or create your own quickly and easily
• payment gateways: out of the box you’ll get the following, however there are many more in the magento-connect repository.

  • cheque/money orders
  • credit card capture (for offline processing)
  • paypal – standard, express, and pro
  • google checkout
  • amazon and amazon simple pay

 

• cms: magento provides a very powerful content management system (cms)
• international support: magento has bee translated into over 60 languages and supporting multiple currencies, taxes and payment methods
• marketing: magento offers integrated marketing and promotion tools to get the best out of your site.
• seo: magento integrates search engine optimisation out of the box
• analytics: magento includes it’s own analytics and reporting engine within the backoffice.  you can also integrate with other third party analytics engines such as google analytics.