Delicious Mint

As someone who has created her fair share of e-commerce sites, all of which use open source software, I had been feeling as though open source e-commerce wasn’t at a level it should be. Now I don’t mean to put down osCommerce — I raved about it for years, thought it was the best thing out, and it was what I exclusively used for online stores — but apart from Wordpress it was the only open source web based software I’d used for quite a while. As I started creating more CMS based sites, blogs, photo galleries etc, using software such as Drupal and Textpattern, I began feeling as though something was missing from osCommerce. It just wasn’t evolving as other software was — to configure a site to do the basics was so simple using Drupal or Wordpress, and installing modules was a breeze — apart from applying my design to the site I barely had to touch the code! Eventually I started looking for other software and created some online stores using both Wordpress and Drupal and their respective e-commerce plugins. While both of these options were good, and it is important to use the right application for the job, they didn’t quite have the large user and support base that osCommerce has.

But now things have changed.

I’ve been following the progress of Magento and did a few test installations so I could play around with it while it was in beta. A couple of weeks ago they released version 1 which is pretty exciting. They even have a tool for migrating from an osCommerce based store which I believe will be heavily used as more and more people make the transition. It will be interesting to see how many developers they have contributing modules and whether or not the user base matches or even exceeds that of osCommerce. Magento is a significantly larger install, but it is becoming normal for many open source web packages to be around the 30mb mark, and believe me, it is worth it!

I have yet to create a live store using Magento, but do have one in the works and will be sure to announce it here when it goes live.