InfoTales

Magento is very promising ecommerce software. It was first released in early 2008, and since than it has grown enormously. Now it claims to be used by 30,000+ merchants, and 1.5 million downloads.

I first came across with Magento in mid of 2008. There were two things I found early about it, one it was great software and second it was slow . Lets keep the second part for later discussion. The features offered even in initial releases, were mature and most wanted ones.

As I had experience of working on CRE Loaded and osCommerce, and managing sites built on these, I found the features very mature. Like search is very important feature for an eCommerce site, Magento have fulltext searching, search tracking, incorrect spell mapping and destination page setting for particular keywords.

Another hidden feature that impressed me was, it allows to configure read only mySQL servers for load balancing. I don’t find this feature mentioned at many places now a days, but I think it still exists. Other good features includes mature SEO friendly url structure, grouped, bundle products, multiple stores and websites etc etc.

I was wondering how they were able to identify the most needed features and get it done in a mature way, because such features were a wish list of people managing ecommerce sites. Later I cam to know background of the company and guys behind it, and my assumption was right. The guys behind Magento had a vast experience of work on eCommerce software including osCommerce etc.

Since than, there was no looking back for Magento. They launched an Enterprise edition, added many features, worked on existing ones etc. There is a large community contributing extensions, help and doing so many things.

I have been a fan of Magento from the first day, but this is the first time i am writing about it. I have plan to keep writing more on Magento so stay tuned. By the way you can find Magento on http://www.magentocommerce.com/.