E-Commerce is a huge part of the internet, and choosing the right tool for the job is integral to success. At PRPL, our developers primarily work in PHP, so it was an easy choice going with Magento for our defacto E-Commerce platform. There’s a laundry list of reasons why it’s the best PHP shopping cart, but I won’t go into it here — check out the Magento website for that.
There is, however, one over-arching community complaint that we even found ourselves battling a lot: the learning curve is steep. Real steep. It’s architecture is greatly different than what most PHP developers are accustomed to, and the documentation quite bluntly sucks. It’s my opinion that throwing around explicatives and an excess amount of sarcastic praise is normal (and likely healthy) while learning Magento. But worry not, you’ll come to love the architecture — it makes fantastic things easier!
Over the next few weeks, Zach and I will be aiming a series of blog posts at the finer points of Magento website development with the hopes you can take away some pointers from us that we’ve had to learn along the way. We’ve developed everything from simple out-of-the-box implementations to highly customized and targeted implementations: one of our Magento sites has made over $3 million dollars in online revenue in the last 8 months. Unfortunately, this client is white-labelled, so we will not be able to talk specifics or show examples from this client. 
The schedule is looking something like the following:
- Layouts (XML)
- Multi-Stores and Internationalization
- Custom Modules
- CDN Management
- Customizing the Core of Magento
- General Best Practice
Of course, we’re open to suggestion and would love to hear your thoughts on what matters most to you!
We’ll be back!