Quite some time has passed since I wrote on Magento-related topics, so I would like to take this opportunity and write about what I think has been going on in the Magento world during the last couple of months.
At the beginning of the year – part of it being the first Meet Magento conference in February – it was all about spreading the word: Here’s a brandnew ecommerce platform, offering unprecedented flexibility and ready to take on the big guys of the industry. At the time, Visions for instance presented their approach of using Magento for their client Jack Wolfskin, and Vinai Kopp gave the first insights into extension development, making him – in my opinion – the most noted speaker of the day, talking about technical details that the crowd – who were mostly developers – appreciated the most. Apart from TechDivision‘s Magento manual, published as an eBook, there wasn’t a wide range of literature on the subject and everybody’s approach to working with Magento was more or less trial-and-error.
These days, things have changed considerably. At the moment, it’s not so much about spreading the word anymore, rather, companies are busy using Magento for their projects and finding the right people with the respective knowledge to help them accomplish these tasks. So, the big problem these days is not so much convincing people to actually try Magento, but to find people able to handle Magento projects. It seems to me that, at least regarding the German market, people with a sound knowledge of Magento’s inner workings can choose their new employer themselves. Web agencies wanting to use Magento for their customers, software producers aiming at replacing established commercial software with Magento as well as recruiters are competing to find the right people.
The publication of the Magento Enterprise Edition in April 2009 has surely contributed to this growing demand. Not only does this edition come with a range of new features, such as administrator permission roles and content staging and merging, but also support and warranty issued by Varien. I should mention here that Varien took some flak for issuing this edition and asking about $9,000/year for it; critics put forward that the company had used the community’s input to bring their product to perfection, only to add some special features and sell it for hard cash afterwards. A couple of months later, however, there seems to be a more or less peaceful coexistence between the Enterprise and Community Editions. Notably and – in my opinion – quite understandably (this is a business, and at some stage people need to be paid – there ain’t such a thing as a free lunch), Varien concentrates on promoting the Enterprise Edition, for instance issuing screencasts on its exclusive features and having them translated into German for instance.
In Magento’s case, this process of growing up is also marked by attracting criticism from the world of well-established, commercial ecommerce software-production. In late August, Stephan Schambach, founder of Intershop and Demandware, argued against OpenSource software such as Magento in his blog post The Open Source eCommerce Alternative? Are we witnessing yet another Microsoft-OpenSource relationship-pattern: denial – offence – collaboration?
Although the world is still waiting for a comprehensive Magento documentation, things have gotten better in the last couple of months. A number of books have been published on how to actually use Magento – one of them being the German Online-Shops mit Magento written by myself and published by O’Reilly – I hope this little bit of self-marketing is in order ;-) Each day, companies and freelancers from around the world contribute to Magento Connect, offering their extensions to add enhanced functions to Magento. Also, there’s a growing number of tutorials and screencasts available, exploring more and more the technical side of Magento and the different ways of modifying the software.
Meet Magento #2, which will take place in Frankfurt on November 2nd, will be faced with a slightly different situation compared to Meet Magento # in Leipzig: Magento has grown up considerably during the last couple of months, and rather than endorsing a software underdog, this conference will be about an ecommerce player to be taken seriously.
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Hey man, thanks for the flowers :)
I can absolutly agree to your point of view.
Nice summary of where things are at. One of the problems right now (as you sort of mention) is that the overall skills base of the community (both in terms of retail and development expertise) has to catch up with the potential of the platform.
A lot of the extensions are, whilst often cool and useful, little more than tinkering with the edges, and much of what has been done so far is simply replicating what is already out there. This is absolutely not a criticism of those who developed them, rather simply a statement of where things are at just now.
However, I think – both in terms of the core and the sort of extensions being developed – the next couple of years are going to see a real leap forwards in terms of creating improved basic features (search for one) as well as truly innovative new features that will genuinely change ecommerce for the better.
For the first decade of mainstream ecommerce, innovation was pretty much driven by Amazon (and a few others) who had the scale to merge the necessary thought leadership in retailing with the latest web technology skills in-house .
Perhaps in the second decade it will be driven by agile merchants and uber-talented developers combining their respective skillsets to extend and enhance Magento into ways that we can’t even imagine right now.
Your article sums up very well the last year spent with Magento.
It’s only a year and a half old now and we all can see how quickly things have changed… Imagine what the Magento ecosystem will be like a year from now !