Here at the office, when someone wants a small e-commerce site setup we usually leverage ZenCart. It’s well tested and supported and runs countless stores on the web already, but I’m all about change and moving up the stack to the next latest and greatest. Enter Magento.

Magento is “…a platform that combines the flexibility of open-source technology with industry-leading features to provide merchants unprecedented control over store operations.” At least that’s how Varien describes it.

Good things:

• Free and open source. No licensing fees required to use it and the software is backed by a large’ish company.
• Standards. They follow them to a ‘t’. The software is built using the Zend Framework and Zend’s coding standards and principles.
• Easily extended. Because of it’s OOP nature and adherence to standards, it’s easy to create modules to extend Magento’s core functionality instead of hacking the core application (*cough* OSC *cough*).
• Requires PHP and specific server setup. Wait, what?, why is this a good thing? Aren’t specific requirements bad? No, they’re not. These aren’t crazy out of this world requirements, they’re actually on par with today’s standards and specifics mean less margin for error and less time spent creating solutions for every possible setup.
• Good separation of business and presentation. The template is kept abstracted from the code that runs the show, so a designer and developer can work independently without worry.
• Quick development cycle. New releases of Magento are out often.

Drawbacks:

• Fairly new to the scene. Other open source e-commerce solutions have been around the block a lot longer than Magento.
• Not a whole lot of contributed modules. It seems like the community is reluctant to hand back contributions so the community can benefit.

Not too many negatives and they’re solved by getting on board and contributing to the community through testing, patches and modules. Woohoo open source!