ecommerce: zend framework, magento and CI

[eluser]deck1[/eluser]
Hi all,

I am very new in CI community, and i have to say that i love it, both the people and the CI code.

At this time i am involved in some ecommerce proyects, and i am using a heavily modified oscommerce version. You can imagine, the code is a nightmare.

I am planning to change, and here comes the dilemma.

I love CI, i was planning to write a solution that fit my needs, using CI and sometimes using classes and resources from another Open Source solutions. This may take long time, but i have entirely control over code, keeping it as lightweight as possible.

But, in the past August, Magento comes into scene. Magento is an MVC open source ecommerce solution, written over Zend Framework. I have downloaded magento, it looks great, but has a dense structure.

I don't know what to do If i use magento, in a few years it's possible that magento becomes the new oscommerce, with its pros and cons. But at this time i will have a base to work with.

Another possibility is use CI, i will develop it from (semi)scratch, and use some magento and ZF classes, but I don't know if this will be easy enough.

I know that lots of you are involved in oscommerce, what do you think about magento? what do you think is the best way (ZF+Magento vs CI)?

I hope this post will reopen an ecommerce talk, thanks for your time, and sorry for my bad english!

[eluser]johnwbaxter[/eluser]
Interestingly(ish) they use EE for their forum (maybe the whole site, i'm not sure).

I think magento is excellent. If it were me, i'd take what magento has done and build on that, CI is great but magento have done a lot of work and i'm a firm believer in not re-inventing the wheel.

[eluser]alpar[/eluser]
I am developing the first eCommerce site with CI, and i find it better than to use one of the "giants" of the industry. I am trying to make code as re usable as i can't, and CI is much of a help. I also use Xajax, that i think goes excellent with CI to make the user interface more usable. The reason for me doing most of the thing from scratch is part personal, part the needs of the client... rarely someone wants all those feature that a "giant" can offer. This way you can keep things simple and light weight. On the other hand, it's a personal matter, i like to get in touch with the code that i use, i don't feel comfortable working with unowned code. In CI i like it that you can really get to know the code (I do feel bad sometimes that i don't know quite all of it, but i struggle to get to know it). Doing the same with a large application is almost impossible.

[eluser]wemago[/eluser]
i must say i really liked what they did with magento but imho its to its too heavy.
i got the same opinion has alpar, building my own stuff.

[eluser]CI miller[/eluser]
I'm building an ecommerce engine for some clients and I use a modified version of CI. I started analysing the features offered by cscart and selected what I needed.
It's not as big as cs-cart but it has more features than Magento. The magento download has 60Mb and mine has only 3mb. What I can say is that my ecommerce is behaving A LOT faster than Magento and I'm using a shared hosting account from resellerzoom. In one month I'll be launching the websites that use the engine and tell you how it behaves in real life. For the front end I'm using cache-ing extensively and I think it will be ok.
I think Magento has very good marketing strategy and they really tried their best at the graphical level. It looks spectacular. But for a high-traffic ecommerce websites this is not the most important aspect.
Even I were to choose between already made ecommerce scripts Magento would not be my first choice.

[eluser]mk3[/eluser]
I like magento. actualy havent installed yet, but they have few problems no way to translate no way to import products. no way to customize search a.k.a. advanced search they are still at baby phase and I think I'll wait until they release ver. 1.00 before even installing it Also for my product I think this will be unsuitable so codeigniter here we go