Magento

We use the open-source Ecommerce software platform Magento to build our clients' Ecommerce products. Launched in early 2008, Magento already dominates the open-source Ecommerce market with more than 750,000 downloads in the past year. Its success is built on the reputation it has rapidly established for very comprehensive but flexible control and adaptability at both the front-end (store front) and back-end (administration)

Magento continues to evolve, with the ongoing development and implementation of both back-end and front-end functionality, ensuring the application remains well ahead of the curve and continues to outperform its commercial and open-source Ecommerce competitors.

Magento utilises the Zend framework, which is entirely object-oriented and employs a model-view-controller architecture (MVC), plus it runs PHP 5.2, the most recent version of the widely-used scripting language. Varien, the company that developed and manages Magento, states that they had three central tenets that governed the design of the software.

Flexibility was the primary objective, and the code Magento programmers have developed and continue to improve affords the opportunity for unlimited and seamless customisation.

As part of this, upgradeability was enhanced by keeping community and local customisation separate from the core code that underpins the software.

Lastly, speed and security were obviously of paramount importance, and the standards the developers adhered to while developing maximises Magento's productivity while ensuring a secure online store front.

Magento's flexibility and versatility is due in large to its open-source development. Because the source code is freely available to its users, we can take the core framework Magento provides and then tailor the store front to suit the requirements of each individual client. As our client, your only outlay is on work that manipulates the software to integrate it with your specifications; you pay nothing for the platform itself. The proprietary rights to the software remain with the client, and there are no ongoing product licensing fees or lock-in contracts between Magento and DogHouse Media. Clients control the customer and product databases, which may be moved or exported to another service at any time.

Commercial software is restricted by the resources of the company that develops it, and the man-hours they are capable of expending on it. Once the software has been released, the company has no incentive to continue striving for excellence. Magento, by contrast, offers access to a community of many thousands of developers, all users like you with a vested interest in the continuing quality of the software, who contribute their improvement and modifications to the development pool. This ensures the continuing progression and guarantees the longevity of the application.