VirtueMart is in TROUBLE - New Player In Town

[tcraw1010]

On an eCommerce site I frequent, someone just posted a blurb about a relatively new OPEN SOURCE eCommerce system called MAGENTO.

Has anyone heard about this? The system seems to have a whole mess of cool features that VirtueMart doesn't offer - i.e. Wish List, Price Range Shopping, Tag Cloud, Comparison Shopping, etc.

I wish there were more developers out there for VirtueMart who would get on some of these things for VirtueMart ... otherwise, something like this Magento is going to quickly overshadow VM as an os ecommerce solution.


Whataya think?



TOM

[instantinlaw]

Hi Tom,
It does indeed look like it will be a contender for not only VM, but for osCommerce as well. I found it about a month ago while searching for an online mall script.
Unfortunatly Magento is not a stable program at this time and is still in beta. I am watching it though as it does promise to be a leader in online commerce.

[tcraw1010]

If it does become a stable platform, I would assume that template makers would soon follow. This may actually be a good opportunity for JoomlArt to look into NOW rather than jumping on the bandwagon following others.

Also, perhaps this will finally give the VirtueMart development team reason to step things up and producing some great new features for VirtueMart.

[instantinlaw]

I think there is a tutorial on the Magento site showing how to make a template. There are also some good posts in the forum on the subject.

[tcraw1010]

I inquired about support and templates on the Magento message board, and this was the reply I received from one of the developers . . .

Support is currently provided by the community. Once a production version is available, professional services will be available through Varien (the company behind Magento) and its’ network of soon to be partners. In regards to templates, we expect a large availability of templates as the product matures - this is very important for us.

Again, I think this could be a great opportunity for JA to jump ahead of the pack and consider developing templates for this new system. Granted, it's not "Joomla" based (and I'm not certain as the compatibility of the Magento script with Joomla), but you never know until you investigate - right?