Magento - fast-growing eCommerce web application
Summary
Magento is an ecommerce script 100% open source. It was available on March 31, 2008. by Varien, It’s built on Zend Framework components. It is a feature rich eCommerce platform built on technology that gives online merchants unequalled flexibility under content of their eCommerce shops.
Magento is available under the OSL version 3.0.
Magento has two versions: Community and Enterprise Edition. Community version is absolutely free. You can download it from Magento website. Enterprise Edition. It aims at larger business, companies and its price starts on $8,900 per year license.
Magento Connect
Magento provides installation of extensions via the interface in the admin panel.
There are three categories of Magento modules available on Magento Connect:
* Commercial Extensions
* Community Extensions
* Core Extensions
Community mods can be installed via the Magento back-end. The same for Core extensions. Commercial extensions are placed on different pages of Magento Connect and give extensions information (such as price, description, screens etc) and place a link to an external website of a vendor.
Some history notes:
Magento formally started the development in 2007 The first public beta version became available seven months later.
Magento 1.0 was released on March 31, 2008.
Magento 1.1 made Magento faster and provided fixes for many bugs. It was released on July 25, 2008.
Magento 1.3 was released on March 30, 2009. This version of platform contained fixes for many bugs, speed optimizations.
Advantages of Magento:
- SEO optimized to help rank your shops better and drive visitors allowing your business grow
- Flexibility – it’s easy to add new products to your shop
System Requirements
PHP:
* PHP version is 5.2
Required PHP mods:
* Memory_limit no less than 256Mb (preferably 512Mb).
* mcrypt;
* PDO_MySQL;
* hash;
* GD;
* DOM;
* iconv;
* simplexml;
* SOAP (if Webservices API is to be used);
* DOM;
* Safe_mode off;
MySQL:
* 4.1.20 or newer;
* InnoDB storage engine.