Im looking at switching to Magento for a project im going to start.
I was wondering if i could get a bit of advice regarding the Multi-Store implementation.
Does this allow seperate admin users for each store?
Would you recommend this implementation for a small hosted ecommerce application?
Cheers,
Warning - as I'm sure you know, don't start a project with Magento unless you are willing to put a lot of time into it.
That said, to my knowledge the Multistore setup allows one to run multiple stores with the same administration section. You should be able to create multiple admin users - but restricting them to a store isn't available in normal old community edition. It might be available in one of the pay editions.
That said, this extension may do the trick for you: http://www.aitoc.com/en/magentomods_advanced_permissions.html. Note: I've never personally tried this extension and so cannot vouch for it.
Edit
I realized that I never answered your second question.
Though Magento is a very powerful platform with a lot of features, I would not recommend using it for a small hosted ecommerce application. For a small hosted ecommerce store I would consider running Wordpress with the WP-E-Commerce plugin. Wordpress is great for managing website content - and WP-E-Commerce has a lot of features and is consistently being developed and improved upon.
If you are going to go with Magento then I would reccomend using Nexcess hosting. They specialize in hosting Magento and their Magento plans are already optimized for running Magento websites.
enterprise (and maybe professional) edition has the feature you are talking about, separating admin users by store. If you need to restrict that in admin level with community edition you can set up multiple software versions from same development branch with different databases (git is awesome on version tool for that). Lots of different ways to do so if Enterprise is out of reach
regarding of performance i guess you will need a powerful VPS or dedicated machine if you are serious about it and as the traffic grows you then should think about load balancing. Look for magento dedicated host companies for that and it won't run in $5 or $20 per month hosts
You asked:
Does Magento allow seperate admin users
for each store?
The free version (Community version) of Magento doesn't have this feature. There will be a single admin.
But the admin can create user and roles. So, some users can be assigned only to product and category addition page. And some users can only be assigned to Sales part.
Separate admin for each store: This feature is present in Enterprise version of Magento but its cost is too high. At present, it Starts at $12,990 USD/yr
In my opinion, using or not using Magento depends upon the functionality you are searching for your shop.
If you need lots of features and functionalities for your Shop then go for Magento.
If you just want general functions like displaying product, adding to cart, and checkout (that's all), then you may search for any other open source shopping cart.
You may try Oscommerce. I have not used it much but I think there is a Oscommerce module for multi admin login for each store.
Related
I am new to both Magento and Prestashop. I have no clue upto what point I can customize on each platform. So, before I decide, I want your feedbacks on to which direction to go towards. Listed below are the feature I need in the ecommerce site I am going to develop:
Product Type:
Wedding cards and other greeting cards, some cards might have two sides, so the user might need to fill in the text for both cards prior to adding it to the shopping cart.
Features:
Each card will have unlimited options, e.g Changing colors of some
aspects of the card, so the user can see the differences. Each one is
different image, so when the admin adds a product, they need to
upload those variations.
Needs to attach some products to be a
suggestion, e.g when you order a wedding card, we suggest them to get
Place cards and etc.
On a custom card, the user can upload their
photo, and then can add the necessary text they want to appear, then process the order.
The following is almost as to what I am looking for: http://www.betsywhite.com/arya-wedding-invitation-5586-prd1.htm [Click on the play with pallettes to see the changing color in action]
Those are just some of the features that I think are very unusual for a standard E-Commerce site. Can I do those features with Magento and/or Prestashop or I need to build a custom solution?
You can make those features with Prestashop and Magento. But no matter which one you chose, you'll have to personalize/modify your shop to get those features to work.
Prestashop is easier to use and to learn and it is faster because it is slim compared to Magento. On the other hand Magento is even more customizable but it is much harder to learn and getting used to it.
I would give you the advice to install test-versions of both shop-systems and try them yourself. So you'll see which is the better choice for your skills, your needs and your products.
I had to make this choice some months ago for myself. After some testing I chose Presthop and I do not regret my choice. But everbody has to make this choice for himself ;).
Installation and customization are two important considerations during the purchasing decision, especially if the goal is to get the e-commerce site up and running as quickly as possible. These characteristics of Prestashop are better than Magento. While Magento is more customizable, therefore resulting in longer set up and installation times, Prestashop makes a trade-off by having fewer “out of the box ready” features available.
One of the key features of an e-commerce software package is its ability to maximize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) capabilities. Magento has distanced itself from all of its software competitors in constructing the best SEO features of any e-commerce platform.
The support/community of Magento is a little better in my opinion. A lot of the times you get no response on the Prestashop forums and you are left to find a way for yourself. I have worked with both. I would pick the one you are more comfortable with.
Just my 2 cents.
I have a rather complex (one man year development in total) specialist website application based on a CodeIgniter framework. I now have a requirement to add CMS functionality to it so that the users can add articles and similar content to the system to compliment the main functionality.
There are obviously several CodeIgniter CMS systems available - FuelCMS and PyroCMS for example, but which of these (or another) would be best for integrating into a developed site with minimal impact on existing code?
It depends on what you have already. Do you have RBAC in place? If so, that's already half the battle.
There's a lot out there but integrating those might turn out to be more work then writing your own system.
I've answered a similar question a while ago, about merging existing CI projects with a CMS, it might give you some more insight:
Port Codeigniter App to PyroCMS
I need to create a website for a non-profit that will need the following functionality along with the basic page editing and creation (hopefully a free solution)
- Newsletter
- Event Listing + integration with Google Calendar
- Possibly integration with system like guestlistapp to collect payments for Event Tickets
- Membership management system + collect payments
- Paypal Donations
I have looked at Umbraco but doesn't seem to have any of these plugins. Please suggest other systems that you may have used in the past and can be a good fit for this scenario.
Umbraco doesn't come out-of-the box with those plugins, but there are 'packages' available for some of those things, and with some custom code it could do all of those things -
For example, here is a newsletter addin:
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/website-utilities/newsletter
A membership addin:
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/website-utilities/membership-system
A paypal addin:
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/paypal-ipn
An events calendar:
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/website-utilities/pdcalendar
Bottomline however is that with all of these packages, its not just a simple install and give to the client, they may require customization on your part so perhaps your client would be better-off with an off-the-shelf non-profit management package if that is what you are looking for.
Would recommend Joomla 2.5.6 for this.
JomSocial have a package that comes with a paid membership system which costs $268. As well as the membership system, I assume you are aware that JomSocial is a very big extension and wtih the right add-ons, will be able to perform many tasks. Take a look here:
http://www.jomsocial.com/package/
A free solution for paid membership could be Akeeba Subscriptions which is a very flexible component and integrated with lots of other extensions.
For donations, take a look at the category on JED here:
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/e-commerce/donations
For events and news letters, I would probably recommend using JEvents and
JNews which are both free.
As for a Google Calendar, check out GCalendar, which is also free.
Hope this helps.
I would suggest that you look at the "open source cms market share report", which is published every November and is very useful in determining which CMSs are dominant, which are growing and which are fading. For example Joomla is a dominant player, Umbraco is a growing player.
open source cms market share report 2011
The 2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report concludes that three
brands - Joomla!, WordPress, and Drupal - dominate today’s market. The
Report concludes that WordPress leads in brand strength and market
share after a strong year.
The Report follows the market share and brand strength indicators for
20 top systems, assessing each on a wide variety of measures. The
study focuses on identifying the market leaders, both in terms of rate
of adoption and mindshare.
While WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal lead the survey set across a wide
range of measures, the report also identifies other trends in this
year's open source CMS market.
** DotNetNuke continues to lead the .NET CMS race, though Umbraco shows strength.
** Liferay & Alfresco are neck and neck in the Java CMS race.
** Concrete5 turns in an exceptional year.
open source cms market share report 2010
We are setting up a new e-commerce site and while trying to figure out which platform to go with, I would like to know, is there way to migrate from MagentoGo to the Enterprise edition?
Cheers,
Iraklis
p.s. In case you want to contribute to our platform quest, feel free to write your thoughts on this post,
Both editions should have support. I would ask Magento what options you have.
Having said that, you can probably migrate most of the product information using the API and/or DataFlow. That will require you to write a script that takes the information out of Go and then put it into Enterprise Edition.
Orders will probably be a more complicated beast. There is an API available for orders so you will probably need to use that. However, migrating payment information may be tricky as you will likely charge the customer again. I would probably change the payment method to Purchase Order and put the PO value as "Migrated Order".
However, the first thing I would do is talk to Magento about what kind of options you have. I have to imagine that they have created a method for people to migrate out of Go and into Enterprise. They should be based some somewhat the same code so maybe the database can be moved over as well.
So I just started an internship with this nonprofit company and it's pretty cool. My first assignment was to find a type of program that would work well for the company and its users. I and some team members just finished summarizing down what I think is a good list for the needed functionality. Before I started working, I've never even heard of content/document/knowledge/project management systems. So I've done a bit of research on many other programs and I've narrowed it down to Joomla, activeCollab, Basecamp, sharepoint and a few more. Which program out there would fit my needs the best? It doesn't have to be from the list I just wrote, those are just the programs that popped up first when I started searching.
MUST-HAVE CAPABILITIES
Searchable
Keyword search
Advanced search: Ability to tag & search documents by different categories, for example, type of file (e.g. PDF, Word, etc.), service line (e.g., fundraising, strategy, etc.), type of document (e.g., deliverable, data set, etc.)
In-document search
Categorization
Simple navigation to browse all content
Simple to set up and modify the tree/hierarchy used to browse content
Workrooms
Provide each team a separate workroom to post their own documents
Easy to navigate from team workrooms to the Toolkits (best if team workrooms reside in the same system the toolkits reside)
Version Control
Ability to see which is the most recent file
Security
Password protected
Tiered security, i.e. certain permissions for certain users (to create workrooms, change navigation tree, change toolkits, view/post team files, etc.)
Multi-year support
Easy to “archive” old workrooms or files so the navigation doesn’t become cluttered over time
Share across workgroups
Ability for power users to access multiple team workrooms
Ability to send docs from one group to another—or to the toolkits (by simple tagging or simple “submit” feature)
Uploading
Ability to upload files to workrooms
Ability to submit a new file for consideration for a toolkit (not a file currently in any workroom)
OPTIONAL CAPABILITIES
Messaging
Opt-in notification of uploaded files or changes to existing files
Version Control
Ability to see who has the file checked out
External Access
Client access to certain documents
Within our website
Users gain access from our website
It looks like it resides on our website
Collaboration Tools
Team Calendar
Blog / Forum
Instant Chat
WebEx/Remote Presentation (for virtual team meeting)
Ratings
1-5 Star document rating (by user community)
Searching & Sorting documents by rating (best documents display first in search results)
Simultaneous Edit
Multiple people can edit the same document at same time
Workflow
Ability to tag a file to be reviewed by another user (ability to “escalate” a file for review by someone else)
Messaging alerts when a file has been flagged for a user
Most of the features that you mentioned above are available for free using Plone, which is an application that runs on top of Zope. I actually built and deployed an instance of Plone for a non-prof that had a lot of the features that mentioned above. They features might not have had the same names, but you get a lot of the same functionality.
Here's what my users really liked about Plone:
The ability to index the content of MS Office documents, so that people could search for documents based on content in addition to property and tags/keywords.
Usability. The default theme for Plone isn't the flashiest thing that you will ever see, but it's usability is excellent.
How easy it was the change the system and add new sites or functionality.
Here's what I liked about Plone:
Zero licensing costs. I was able to implement features that usually only come in very expensive systems for free. And I'm aware of these types of costs, because I administer FileNet systems for a living
It was very easy to install, upgrade, and administer. Please take that "pro" with a grain of salt if you're not a professional systems administrator :)
Overall, it was just very easy to work with.
And here are my cons:
If you need the web site to be accessible on the public internet, then your hosting costs may be higher-than-expected. It's definitely cheaper to set up a vanilla Joomla site than it is to set up a vanilla Plone site. Please note that you sound like you need a lot more than a vanilla content management system, so their may be no difference in hosting costs.
Plone is built on Zope, and Zope is an application server. It's easy to set up and use, but it works a little differently than a lot of other web and application servers. If you're used to administering a LAMP stack, then this will be different (but not necessarily bad).
One final con is true with all modern content management systems: don't give your users enough rope to hang themselves. When it take 2 minutes to a wiki and a blog to a web site, then users expect you to add new sites all of the time. Every new site adds a lot of administrative work to your plate, so try and get as much functionality as you can from each site that you add.
Hope that helps!
Tom Purl
Basecamp. Even if it doesn't have all the features you think you need, it does what it is supposed to (37Signals loves to rant about too many features, you aren't gonna need it (YAGNI), etc.)
Joomla is a pain. Activecollab is a poor clone of basecamp (unless it has changed drastically in the year or so that its been since I tried to use it to get out of paying for basecamp).