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I posted way back at the end of June on my use of Magento over Cubecart. Well it’s been seven months since then and I’ve had a few people asking how things are going …so here are a few thoughts.

My first Magento store is now open and doing pretty well. There were a few …well, lots of problems along the way, but most have been ironed out. I think a lot of it is learning how to use Magento properly – and I’m still learning.

I had to sit down with my client for a good few hours at the beginning so we could figure out how to do product options. She’s now pretty proficient at it, so despite being amazingly complicated, it appears to be manageable.

One of the major problems I had was with uploading images. Each time we attempted to upload an image everything would seem to upload ok but then Magento would act like you didn’t upload anything and then log you out on the next reload. After extensive trawling through the Magento forums I discovered that two lines in a php.ini file were all that was needed to fix the problem (extension=pdo.so and extension=pdo_mysql.so). I think that the fact that Magento was unable to prevent this or figure it out for itself shows its age.

Another feature which shows Magento’s age, and actually makes it feel like it’s still in beta, is table rate shipping. It sounds perfect in concept, and the usage instructions on the website are pretty comprehensive, but it simply doesn’t work. Not just for me either, so many people were posting comments about its problems

I think my biggest problem I’ve had, actually a humongous massive problem was with updating Magento. I dread updates and avoid new addons. On the surface the process seems very automated and straight forward, but I’ve tried several times now and none have been unproblematic to the extent that the Magento installation usually ends up completely broken. I was only able to fix the problems by doing fresh installs. Magento is so obese that the length of time it takes to back it up (especially once its populated with products) renders updating and extending completely impractical in my opinion. Furthermore, customising a skin is incredibly complicated to start with, but maintaining one between Magento updates is simply painful.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve decided that Magento’s rich feature set completely kicks Cubcart’s arse. Product options, associated products, and discount codes are amazing and the one page checkout is pretty good too, but many features still seem unpolished, and user-unfriendly. However before Magento can assume dominance in the online commerce market, I think it needs to transform from a online shopping cart with very limited CMS functionality into a full CMS with complete commerce functionality.

Finally, and most importantly, a stable and reliable method of updating which does not require impractical backups and does not break skins is paramount for any progression.

My uni seems incapable of setting a single timetable for a term and sticking to it, so they make several “up-to-date” timetables available on their website which are updated daily. However they insist on keeping these timetables in Word and Excel formats, because that’s what they are made in and everyone has Office, right?

Well I have M$ Office 2008 installed on my iBook G4, and it’s painfully slow to open and it hogs pretty much everything. So I spent a while looking for somekind of plugin for Firefox to open Word and Excel documents inside Firefox, like you can do with IE on Windows.

Only one such plugin exists, Word Browser Plugin not surprisingly opens Word documents in browsers such as Firefox, but not very well – it doesn’t like tables. Since I mainly want to open timetables, this is a problem. Apparently no other plugins exist for this purpose so I gave up and continued to use Office to view the timetables.

However a couple of days ago I stumbled accross Quick Viewer Droplet, an AppleScript by Apple. Quick Look is a part of OS X, that allows you to preview documents from within Finder such as Office documents without opening Office or whatever program is used to open them. This in itself partially solves my problem – I could use Quick Look to open the timetables without need to grind my iBook to a halt by opening Office, but Quick Viewer Droplet cuts out Finder and previews files in Quick Look directly, so that Firefox can be set to automatically preview Word Documents and Excel documents!

Amazing, isn’t it?!

I included SafariPlus in my original list of the best free programs available on OS X and Windows. It’s an InputManager plugin for Safari on OS X, mainly for cookie management but also for blocking flash and gif animations. It’s best feature was however it’s ability to set “favourite” cookies and delete all none favourite cookies upon exiting Safari.

It was one of those gems that you don’t realise you need until you stumble across it, and then don’t realise the value of until you loose it. I mean, the threat of cookies shouldn’t require a tinfoil hat, we know they are mostly used in our best interest to personalise our experience of websites and increase efficiency blah blah, and while there are some organisations that try to use them to track our browsing habits, which can seem a little too infringing upon one’s freedom, at the end of they day despite the possibly selfish and greedy motivations, it’s only so they can provide more suitable content to meet our needs, yes to enable them to make more money, but nevertheless to meet our needs. Yet I still found an empty hole in my life upon discovering that SafariPlus was not compatible with Leopard – I had lost this control.

I searched high and low for an alternative, the best I could find was PithHelment, which is a great plugin for it’s many other features, but it’s ability to delete all cookies on exit by default proved simply not to work (at least under Leopard), so I spent many sleepless nights pondering what to do. Ok I maybe exaggerating a little, I mean what actually is the worst thing that can happen with cookies? The only real problem I can see is loosing control over your own information. Why should a website store information about me for future reference without my permission? …or share my browsing habits with anyone without my permission?

Anyway so I decided to see if there was an easy fix staring me in the face, starting by looking at SafariPlus’ Info file, which I changed it to XML a la the other plugins in my InputManagers folder – Growlmail and SIMBL, which amazingly, after a restart of OS X, did bugger all – so I gave up. However I later installed Inquisitor, and magically SafariPlus worked (…kind of). My guess is that Inquisitor changed the permissions for the InputManagers folder or something similar, but whatever it was – SafariPlus lives again!

(I said “kind of”, because it’s a little buggy – as in you can only save new favourite cookies one at a time by ticking one and then clicking on the Animation policy tab and then ticking the next one and then again clicking on the Animation policy tab and so on, but I can live with that.)

To be fair Inquisitor probably did most of the hacking, but I’d like to think my “hack” of the Info file helped too. So the buggyness is a bit rubbish, but the fact that SafariPlus is once again kind of working gives me hope for the future

(edit: ok SafariPlus isn’t deleting cookies on exit, but you can successfully delete all non favourites manually.)

SafariPlus (449 downloads)