What's New with Magento

First, let me tell you that I will soon be receiving the Magento 1.3 PHP Developer’s Guide to review. Magento has an architecture link no other software. Hopefully this  book sheds some light on developing with Magento and beats hunting a pecking through the forums. The last book I bought for a CMS was one for Drupal. With Wordpress, I picked up everything I know online.

Up to a few weeks ago, I was about done with Magento. I have a post I was working in in my drafts on suggested shopping carts. Magento is not in the list. Because anywhere attributes are loaded, Magento is slow.  Anywhere configurable products are loaded, Magento is slow. Anywhere products are listed in a collection, Magento is slow. You go to checkout and Magento is slow. This did not happen up to a certain amount of products and a certain amount of attributes, but at some point, the sites seem to hit a wall. But I have found a few solutions like html block caching in the meantime and think I can make this work for our sites using Magento. Not so sure I want to tackle another site using Magento yet though, at least not with the product complexity of Magento sites I have built.

And so yesterday I go and update our Magento installations to 1.4. Those who know Magento, know how well that went. But it’s working now and here is how I Upgraded to Magento 1.4, if you need that info.

The 1.4 version of Magento has custom variables, widgets and new cache and index system from what I can see so far.