We are convinced that WordPress knows how to give background on all types of web projects. Helped Wp-E-Commerce, he can be a formidable competitor for the largest e-commerce platforms such as Magento. Of course, I already hear those of you saying that Magento comes stock of more e-commerce functionality as wp-e-commerce has not. I simply answer, depending on the customer needs.
We wanted to present an angle WordPress E-Commerce without technique, but knowing that we are totally biased, we prefer to tell you the adventure of a Magento developer meeting the WordPress world.
Be a programmer typically means that your family and all your friends take for granted the fact that you 1) know a fix wifi router and 2) you might want to do. For the same reason we are often asked to set up a website, a blog, develop web 2.0-death-that-kills, or all at once, an application, the more often I cannot help by lack of free time. However, I still managed to find time for one based on WordPress and WP-E-Commerc project. This note is a study of the project that compares solutions WP-E-Commerce and Magento.
My girlfriend Cindy asked me to help his new company: Cheap Titles (the site is selling property titles New Zealand). I naturally helped concoct a site. In fact, although I spend most of my time to develop extensions for Magento, I gave a chance to the combination + WordPress WP-E-Commerce. As I summarize the reasons for this in the next section, I will simply say that it has made things much easier.
I summarize here my experiments in creating the site with WP-E-Commerce, the differences I have noticed between the two platforms, and in particular that I think the quality of the underlying code of WP-E -Commerce compared to Magento.
Why WordPress and not Magento?
First of all, why would a developer work on Magento as me, he could even imagine that another way? Seeing that the site did not need a huge catalog, or any features bling Magento, it was not a foregone use. WordPress is a much simpler and lighter solution. It is easier to use for non-computer, which is an important point, because I did not want to have to answer questions such as "Why my products are not they posted?"
Another point specification was the presence of a blog. I know there are extensions for Magento dedicated to it and I know it can interface WordPress and Magento by a multitude of ways (one of the best is to encapsulate WordPress between the header and footer Magento).
I do not use this extension because I do not like the idea of using a blog that is not WordPress, simply because I know it is used so that I would find the solution on Google almost all problems. The integration between the two would have worked but would have required a lot of extra effort, for virtually no gain knowing that advanced Magento features were not needed (for example as comparison between products).
That is the reason for this choice: blogging with ease.
Construction Site
If you have ever met me you should know that I am far from the artistic side, therefore the site was built using a customized version of a paid theme. In fact I must admit that I do buy more themes of this team ... in fact some of my criticisms of the code (below) are the fault of the theme of WordPress extension underlying.
Besides that, the construction site has resulted mainly working on my CSS and PHP code, and Cindy adding products and content. Everything went as planned, quickly and smoothly. The site is now in production and process orders.
It worked well
Many things were very easy to install and worked well on my site.Voici selection:
Adding a custom field to the address of the title, it worked well, just redirecting the customization options of a product. With Magento would have been a custom field to a product, so it is doable.
Payment methods and placing an order: in comparison with Magento, the payment procedure in WP-E-Commerce is relatively simple, and it is a refreshing change. Integrating Paypal also works "out of the box", which is nice? The payment page is a single page where you can choose the form's controls very easily. On cheaptitles.co.nz, we only need 3 fields: the name, phone number and email address. Magento customization page for payment may be less painful.
Adding Products: added product form is a single page, there is really no way of haywire and it has all the necessary features for the site: a title, a description, a picture and a price. In addition, that is all.
Integrating a blog: As I said earlier, even if Magento can handle it, there is nothing simpler than native WordPress.
That did not work well
I had to eliminate many bugs in the theme, and I had to improve certain areas. The theme seemed to be an accumulation of hacks. Some of the problems I faced.
The payment button (the largest site!) Does not work with Internet Explorer. Yes, it is total loose. The HTML button does not have a type = "submit" that Firefox interprets it as a validation button, while IE does nothing when clicked. This gives an overview of how the subject has been tested ... A theme for e-commerce application that does not allow control of the most widely used browser, it will not help you make a fortune.
The numbering was faulty (current page == max page and not> =), so Google has indexed about 160 blank pages:
A bug in the numbering led Google to index a bunch of empty pages.
This has now been resolved with redirects and I completely off the page numbering products, because the store will ever need more than one. However, it is a trap for beginner’s people in creating websites that might not notice such things. It is a highway to be banned from Google indexing if you leave one of his robots trapped in an endless loop of empty pages!
Code quality in general
Developer's point of view, the difference between Magento and WP-E-Commerce is astronomical. WP-E-Commerce is the heir to the world of PHP as a script for the web, where absolutely everything is contained in files php: Business logic, the controller and the persistence layer. This gives the impression to make when they read archeology and publishes these files. This is because at the University Before performing to program Software Company, we simply write all the code in large and long file because it seems easier at the time. To be honest, there are traces of modularity and even a framework of themes in WP-E-Commerce, but it is not a substitute for a modern object-oriented application.
The reality is that the old software architectures make the code harder to read, modify and refactor and WP-E-Commerce suffers from this evil. My technical development is mainly based on the search for a string that I hope to find in the code (CSS display class or a string) then I search with grep in the wp-content file.
To give you an example, take a look at this piece of code extract the ordering process:
case "delivery_country":if(wpsc_uses_shipping() && (get_option('use_billing_unless_is_shipping') != 1)) {$country_name = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT `country` FROM `".WPSC_TABLE_CURRENCY_LIST."` WHERE `isocode`='".$_SESSION['wpsc_delivery_country']."' LIMIT 1");$output = "".$country_name." ";} else if(get_option('use_billing_unless_is_shipping') == 1) {$output = wpsc_shipping_country_list();} else {$checkoutfields = true;//$output = wpsc_shipping_country_list($checkoutfields);$output = wpsc_country_region_list($this->checkout_item->id , false, $_SESSION['wpsc_selected_country'], $_SESSION['wpsc_selected_region'], $this->form_element_id(), $checkoutfields);}break;
We find the HTML, the business logic and some access to the database, all in one place display.
This is very different from the architecture of Magento (MVC + EAV), and it is easy to understand why an application like Magento is able to develop, implement new features at a rapid pace without collapsing under its own weight. Having said that Magento is much more complex, not only for users but also for developers.
Of course this does not take into account the performance of the application, Magento requires considerable effort and resources optimization. As always, it is a compromise.
Conclusion
Now that the site is up and sells securities like hotcakes, I am able to ask me if I would do it the same way. The fact is that despite the problems with the quality of the code I have highlighted, I still think the site has been developed faster and require less maintenance in the end a site based on Magento. So yes, for projects with an average size, I would do it again with WordPress.
In addition, you are asking the question you already use Magento and all its heaviness when WordPress Wp-and E-Commerce knows very well draw on reasonable projects?
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