I gave a presentation to the Corvallis e-Tailing Group in town on Magento eCommerce Community Edition. We used Magento to build the 300dpi web site so we have experience skinning it, adding plug-ins, get plug-ins to play nicely, and extending Magento. More info here: Handout From Corvallis e-Tailing Magento eCommerce Presentation (http://www.proworks.com/blog/2010/03/handout-from-c…e-presentationhandout-from-corvallis-e-tailing-magento-ecommerce-presentation/)

1. A Developer’s View of Magento eCommerce
General Information
Magento is an open-source ecommerce web application launched on March,
2008. It was created by Varien, building on components of the Zend
Framework on PHP.
Magento Enterprise Edition, a paid for version of Magento aimed at
larger companies, was launched on April 15, 2009.
Links
Magento: http://www.magentocommerce.com
Community Edition Demo: http://demo.magentocommerce.com
Community Edition Demo Admin Panel:
http://demo-admin.magentocommerce.com/index.php/admin
Free vs. Paid: http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/compare
Local-ish Examples:
http://www.wallbedfactory.com/
http://www.300dpi.com/
Pros/Cons
Good Not Good
 Robust full featured product  Not a robust CMS
 Can handle large operations  Still bugs in under used parts of the
 Default design usable out of the box software.
 Pretty good selection of plug-ins  Customization beyond the admin
 Community version is free area (code) can get complicated.
 Good attention to SEO  The plug-ins can to be buggy and
 Can support multiple stores within may not work if you customize
same install anything.
 Good reporting  Support for community version is
 Time-savers like batch import and hard to find.
integration with other systems like  The dev community isn't super
Google Base helpful
 Most of the features you would  Paid version is quite expensive
want are available in some form ($11K) & may still require you to be
(downloadable products, reviews, hosted with them.
product configurations, localization,  Lots of options. Sometimes hard to
shipping options, promos, accounts, find in the myriad of configuration
etc) settings.
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