Well, let’s say my first dips into Magento commerce have come with mixed results.  I really like their interface right out of the box, and I like a lot of the options that they offer.  I truly believe that with a little more maturity this will be my shopping cart of choice.  However, I’m not sure I’m ready to move everything over this this just yet.

It takes some effort to get setup for the first time as it requires PHP 5 to be setup like it needs it.  In my case, a recompile of PHP and apache was necessary.  That’s no real problem if you host it yourself, but on a shared hosting environment you may find it difficult to get the necessary modules enabled.  So, be sure to check to see if your host is Magento-friendly before you dive in head first.

I tried the downloader install first, as it makes more sense to not download the entire cart, decompress it, and the upload it to my server.   However, something wasn’t right and after several tries it couldn’t install the cart (I have got this to work on my second install, but I still don’t know what the difference was for this first install.).  So, I downloaded everything, extracted it, and waited forever for it to upload (It’s not that big, but there are a lot of files).  Once uploaded, the install went fine.

After getting it to install I was excited.  I could finally play with it!  My first task was to try and wrap a custom design around the stock content area.  Wow, the templating system is a bit complex to wrap your head around initially.  After a couple of failed attempts at theming the site and a lot of googling for answers I finally figured out the basics of how it works.  I had to re-install the default template and erase my butchering of the site and start fresh, but my  third attempt was successful.  I could probably theme it about as fast as OSCommerce now that I know how it works.

On my second install, I was attempting to migrate an OSCommerce website that had about 3,000 products.  The latest Magento was 1.3.1, so Installed that and attempted to use the migration tool.  Unfortunately, the migration tool quit working when Magento was upgraded to 1.2 so that was a waste of time (spent about 5 hours trying to make it work).  I finally decided to just install 1.1.8, migrate OSCommerce, then upgrade.  I deleted the database, removed the uploaded cart, and am in the process of uploading 1.1.8.  Once it is finished, we will see if it works a little better when importing from OSC.