When you are a web developer, there are three questions that you hear every single day. The first is: “A friend told me you build websites, is that true?” The second is: “How much do you charge for a website?” Finally, you hear: “What is the best website for me?”
This article is written to help answer that third question, when you are speaking to someone who is considering building an e-commerce website. With so many platforms out there, its hard for someone to decide whether Zencart, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, or Magento is the right solution for them.
Zencart and Joomla are things that I try to steer my clients away from. Zencart as a platform lacks many of the customizable options that business owners are looking for; and Joomla is not a robust enough architecture to handle large CMS systems or in-code checkout processes for thousands of users. Drupal is a very robust platform, but it is designed with a programmer in mind, as the visual interface in the back-end is very sparse, and most of the time is spent on the command line.
For their money, I always recommend that business owners looking to build a site choose WordPress or Magento.
WordPress: A Review
WordPress is arguably the most popular content management system in the world. Almost every website on the net is built on a WordPress platform. When it was first released, it was the system of choice for blogs. The stability of the code combined with a very visual back end was perfect for opening the web to the world.
WordPress opened the door for developers to create a template, on a dedicated and standardized system, and sell those plugins and themes. Everyone with knowledge of PHP, and the proprietary system known as hooks, started putting together fully functional themes for those that had little programming experience, and extremely customizable themes for those who could take advantage of extra features.
Of course, as the Internet started taking more and more market share as a percentage of total sales, those same developers started creating commerce themes. These had shopping carts, customer management capabilities, and ways to contact authorize.net.
The only drawback is a fairly obvious one; WordPress was not originally designed for commerce. It is open-source, and if you have knowledge of PHP, it is also infinitely customizable. However, it is very rare that a programmer is also the business owner, and most owners spend their time taking care of their customers and not learning computer languages.
Enter: Magento
Magento is what the World Wide Web came up with when confronted with the problem of easy commerce. Like WordPress, Magento is open source, and with knowledge of PHP, is infinitely customizable. Unlike WordPress, it was designed explicitly with commerce in mind.
When I explain Magento to clients, I almost always have to evoke the name of WordPress in the explanation. It’s pretty easy to see why when you put them side-by-side. Both platforms are immensely stable, and neither require you to learn mountains of proprietary code. Magento Developer have an easy time picking up Magento, and because of this there are hundreds, if not thousands, of developers creating plugins and themes for Magento.
The major difference that I point out is in what the platforms focus on. WordPress can be made into a commerce site, and there are themes out there that do it quite well; but at it’s core, WordPress is a content management system. At Magento’s core is a client management system, and they focus on that aspect incessantly. So in terms of collecting and storing client content, Magento can’t be beat; furthermore, there are many extensions out there to help make your site PCI compliant almost overnight.
If you want to give your customers the option to store credit card information, and still want to be PCI compliant, there is an extension for that. Want nightly backups to prevent hacking, there’s not only hosting solutions, but extensions for that as well.
All in all, Magento is the commerce wave of the future, its just wondering when you’re going to get on board.
Article source: http://discusstech.org/2011/12/the-long-haul-choosing-magento-over-wordpress/
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