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Comment by code_duck | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Magento is the WordPress of commerce software: feature rich and popular, but not particularly well written, and tied to PHP/MySQL. Like WP, it is based upon a questionable custom framework.

I'd love to see a well done, customizable, open source ecommerce system for a language that I'd actually want to use. For best hope of popularity, Django or Rails makes sense. Last time I checked around for Django ecommerce projects, I didn't see anything grand.

I'm going to be working on stuff like this over the summer; anyone have a suggestion for a Django or Rails project to improve or adopt?

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Don't know much about rails but for Django there

- Satchmo(http://satchmoproject.com/)

- Lightening Fast Shop (http://www.getlfs.com/)

More info

- http://djangopackages.com/grids/g/ecommerce/

- http://readncode.com/blog/the-state-of-ecommerce-in-django/

I used Satchmo sometime back and it's a very good but low level solution. You can do a lot with it.

I did not use LFS but it seems something which can help you setup a cart very quickly, like pinax does for social sites.

EDIT: Fully agree about Magento/WP. From a cursory look into Magento internals seemed of questionable design and unnecessarily complicated.

The most prevalant rails one is Spree: http://spreecommerce.com

I'm in the opening stages of building a spree site right now, and at this early point it seems really good. The developers are responsive on irc and on the list, and the repo gets regular pushes.

Its a rails3 engine, and makes full use of this and other rails3 features, plus the devs have extensive plans to use the various 3.1 improvements. It's really modular; the spree gem is actually a meta-gem with deps pointing to other gems, 'spree-core', 'spree-auth', 'spree-promo' etc.

You make all your customisations to it in the same way, by decorating the various core classes, following the same pattern as the spree submodules themselves.

Oh and it has shitloads of tests, both rspec and cucumber/capybara.

Basically it seems pretty sweet.

At least as a dev you can get WP to do what you want pretty easily, regardless of how bad the code is. In comparison Magento is far more convoluted.

If you're familiar with Django, I'd check out django-shop or satchless. They're much more developer geared, and a little less "finished product".

Magento is also a huge resource hog. Wordpress at least is somewhat tame in that department.

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