Over This

Magento is not too intuitive

I don’t consider myself a novice when it comes to e-commerce systems, but Magento sure has given me some headaches. I will admit that I started off without reading a user guide, and that was probably not the smartest thing. I’ve read a few knowledgebase articles and a few forum posts, and now I’m finally making some progress.

I would definitely say the not too intuitive process of doing things has contributed to my slow progress. I was able to add a category and product without much trouble, but I had no clue why they weren’t showing up on the site. It turns out that you have to add new categories under the default category. I started out not even using the default category and created my own. That was a headache solved by reading a forum post. So, now I have categories that are “anchored”, which is how they phrase adding the category to the nav bar. I can only imagine what fun I’ll be having with theming …

Something else that didn’t make sense right away was the difference between a “simple product” and a “configurable product”. It turns out that they are related rather than just plain different. As far as I can tell, you have to set up all the variations of a product first as simple products, and then you do some work with the configurable product settings. Since I built the now dead Bridesave.com site, I suppose I can use it as an example … If a wedding dress came in 12 shades of white, would I have to create 12 separate simple products? That doesn’t seem right since all the products are the same except for the color. And if each dress also came in 8 sizes, would I have to have each one of those in each of the 12 colors? That seems crazy, but actually now that I think about it, it is not uncommon to run out of a popular color in a popular size, and that would be the only way to make a variant unavailable.

Hmm, now that I am reflecting back on the Bridesave.com site, I think I built a pretty usable product. Someone took over the coding after me, but I think the major guts of the site were still mine. It definitely didn’t have the flexibility that Magento seems to have, but it was a custom job, and I only added what was requested.

One thing that I’m curious about with Magento is the API. I wonder what all it can do … On the other hand, just like Drupal, I think I’ll spend some time looking at what the community has already written before diving into the API.