Magento vs. CodeIgniter and writing from scratch

Question

Hi,

I need to develop an eCommerce website using PHP. I am not sure if to use Magento or use CodeIgniter and write the site basically from scratch.

I have experience with CI and no experience with Magento.

My questions regarding Magento:

1. Performance: I read that it has performance issues.

   • Is it the case for the latest version too (1.3.2)?
   • For a site that sells 200-1000 items daily, is it simply a matter of adding more hardware? How much more money, on average, will have to be spent on hardware?
     
     

2. Customization: For the modifications below, Will I need to change the actual code of Magento for such modifications? Will I need to write my own modules/plugins/extensions? If yes, how difficult is it?

   • removing "blocks"
   • client wants to have "deal of the day"
   • products are divided by "brands" instead of categories
   • removing functionality from back-end to simplify things for client.
     
     

Overall, I will appreciate your advice whether to use Magento or CI+writing code and if its feasible to complete either of these choices in 2-3 months for a single developer?

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

If you pick CI, you have to write a lot of modules that are already built in Magento. I would suggest you pick Magento and then rewrite or make enhancements to fix the performance issues once you start noticing them.

Answer 2

Hi I was in exactly the same situation a few months back .... choosing between a custom CI site or magento. I went with magento and I don't regret it.

You will however face a huge learning curve and a lack of documentation on how to do various things in magento. As far as performance goes you can make a huge difference on magento loading speed with memcached, apc, gzip and mysql query cache. This is without adding any expensive hardware. (I would advice getting more RAM to move magento cache/ session to memory)

That being said don't even be bothered trying to run magento on a shared host!

Answer 3

as much as i love CI and find magento extremely slow, i think it would be the better solution for building an e-commerce site of the magnitude you describe

Answer 4

You might want to consider Drupal's third-party e-commerce module..

Answer 5

Hi,

Well I use CI on my day by day work, and really love it!
I also manage some online shops made in magento, and I can tell you that if you are working alone, I will take several years to achieve consistency, quality, plugin capabilities, community support, etc that magento can give you just "out of the box".

If you use Magento, you can focus just in the design, administration of server and your marketing strategy. If you need some extra functionality you can reuse comunity plugins our buy commercial ones.

Integrations with paypal, amazon pay, google check out, etc are out of the box, the backoffice is just impressive, you can manage almost everything, and reporting functionalities are massive. With magento backoffice you can also manage several stores from the same backoffice and catalog of products.

Customizing code of Magento is easy if you know basic LAMP, it's not big deal!

If I was you I would choose Magento, and use CI for other projects.

But if you just want one really simple store you should check this list of free online store engines, maybe you can find other solutions:

37 Shopping Cart Options for Developers

Best Regards,
Pedro Camacho
@pcamacho

Answer 6

I'd say you should go with magento. This way, you will need only to focus on design. Functionality has already been done.

Answer 7

if you're looking for a shopping cart written in CI, try JEM by JROX.COM

Answer 8

I'd say you should go with magento.

Answer 9

Give Total Shop UK a go, it’s based on CI v1.7.2

Download - sourceforge.net/projects/totalshopuk/files/

Live Demo - http://www.totalshopuk.com/

General Information

Total Shop UK eCommerce was initially developed by myself to use as a template for creating complete custom eCommerce sites for customers. I wanted to develop something that was easy to use and manage by everyone. After working with osCommerce and a few others I found that they were okay but they were not as easy as they could be for shop owners and to customise them took quite some time.

TSUK has been setup with Search Engine Optimisation in mind, using mod_rewite for friendly urls and meta tags created either dynamically or editable using the content managed pages.

Payment system setup was the next step and again I wanted something that could be easily set up and with PayPal that made it all possible. To set up TSUK with PayPal all that needs to be changed is the PayPal email address.. Simple!!

codeigniter.com/wiki/Total_Shop_UK/