Magento vs Cubecart
Since discovering Magento, I’ve stopped developing with Cubecart. The first thing that attracted me to Magento was that it was free and it didn’t require each page to have “I’m a tight-ass using the free version of some cheapo shopping cart” in it’s title …and it was template driven.
After looking into it more deeply I’ve found that Magento is much more sophicated than Cubecart, supporting product options, grouped and related products, multiple stores, discount codes, “seo friendly urls”, and customer whishlists, all “out of the zip archive”. However after working with it for a few weeks now, it’s becoming more and more obvious that Magento is still only a baby. While it’s seemingly bursting with amazing features, some of them seem incomplete and most seem to have been designed from the viewpoint of the programmer rather than the end user, resulting in Magento being more complicated than sophisticated.
Here’s a few problems I’ve had with Magento already:
- There’s no way of viewing all the products in the store by manufacturer
- The urls aren’t all seo friendly, in fact filtering/layered-navigation makes very seo unfriendly urls
- New administrators are given no role by default and so can’t log in to the admin panel
- The CMS system is bollocks. There’s no parent-child relatinships for a start
- Themes/skins are far too over complicated to make and edit
- The documentation is nowhere near complete, for end users or developers
A couple of final thoughts:
There is definitely something to be said for the simplicity of Cubecart.
I think part of the major problem with these open source but commercial web applications is exactly that:- while they are open source so the community can edit and modify the source code to meet their needs, they are commercial. I think this results in much less contribution from the community and most of the contributions that are made are commercial.
September 14th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
I also came across your blog by chance. You have made some very good points.
I used to work with Cubecart as well but now I can see the true potential of Magento and their team seem alot more willing and poractive about getting new updates out when Cubecart don’t ever seem to have any decent updates of their software.
You made the original post in June. I’d love to know how your getting on and what you decided to do in the end?
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July 17th, 2008 at 10:57 am
Hi,
I came across your post by chance. I’m in the situation of either opting for Cubecart or Magento.
So have you abandoned Cubecart entirely, or have you continued with Magento?
I suppose like you I’m looking for a bit of both, “simple to use (especially for shop owner) but flexible without being over complicated”.
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