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Comment by obviouslygreen | Hacker News Reader

Debugging Magento is a real challenge because Magento is horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible.

It's horrible.

I like your outlook, but man, even in PHP land there are vastly better frameworks that won't make you hate your life (Magento has a nasty track record for me and several other devs I worked with). ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter, even Symfony... if you want to do PHP, do yourself a favor and do something that's not Magento.

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Unfortunately, my company took over a Magento project the last developers majorly screwed up on - we didn't know anything about Zend or Magento until we jumped in to it. I do agree though, Magento is a minefield - but that's part of the fun.

That being said, I am a big fan of CodeIgniter, I love the simplicity of it's MVC system and I wish I did more work with it.

Why do you say "even Symfony"? The buzz I hear is that Symfony is pretty much the most forward thinking framework in PHP and that it's offspring such as Laravel take cake if you're looking for something a bit more streamlined.

Just looking at job boards tells me those tech + drupal seems to be where all the work is (in the UK at least), so yeah, why the "even"?

I haven't done an ecommerce project in quite a while, what would you suggest instead of Magento?

I had the dubious honor of setting up a heavily customized Magento site barely after they released 1.0 - it was a nightmare. No docs, barely any participation in the forums, blog posts with outdated (already) information... I didn't have a say in picking Magento and eventually the client moved to something else as updates and expansion became too much of a hassle.

I hear good things about Woocommerce [1] these days if you're using Wordpress for your main site. It's no where near in the realm of Magento, but fine if you're looking for something simpler but less powerful.

[1] http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/

I'd also be very interested in this. I'm looking for an ecommerce package that does faceted search, supports catering for non US regions, and doesn't require the effort Magento requires to reskin. Something where the goods-in process is easy, no EPOS integration required. Anybody got any good recent experiences?

If you already know Drupal, Commerce is awesome.

I've used Lemonstand for a few projects and really enjoy working with it. There are a few features it's lacking still (no gift certificates, no faceted search) but it's a very flexible system.

(http://lemonstand.com/)

For a developer? Hm, foxy cart, or spree (open source): http://spreecommerce.com/

Well, its 2013, you can't talk about php frameworks and leave out laravel. And I think you should've also mentioned the cool set of packages available on composer.

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