Why Magento sucks?!

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This post was inspired by http://www.commercestyle.com/e-commerce/magneto-sucks

I don't agree on everything that wrote there, I won't say that is so sucky and hard. It's childish way to say system is too complicated, read the f**king manual, omg is this so hard?! So from perspective technical guy that have a lot of finished high loaded projects on the back, I want to explain my "sucky" point about it. 

1) The thing that bothers me for last few weeks is news about Magento acquired by eBay . 

Why? Whats wrong with eBay? The truth is that Magento doesn't supports more than 200,000 customers doesn't bother world wide biggest auction system? All the things that breaks on the way of development and overloaded support forums? Who slept to make this come true? Or this is only to buy a big brand and in nearest future eBay will sell his own engine on this trade mark? Too many questions and too hard to find a light in this tunnel

2) Over designed eCommerce solution

This is not only my, but real point of many experienced developers, this is system lives on two leveled framework: Zend and Mage , the second one is Magento core and thats the point when everybody starts to complain. Guys, PHP is an Interpretator language, when you make this thing goes trough all these levels of hell your CPU will be fried only dreaming about more than 10,000 visits per min. Right now big project where I work is having more than 16,000 visits pre minute and we already use cluster for 10 boxes to make it run, our Master-Slave databases are fried as burger and constantly dying in deadlocks that are done by one very popular request: get product inventory(how much available left). 

3) Support

Say no to support, that moment you've tried to change something in your core files(just to make core functionality works like it was described in their fancy brochure) you automatically kill support functions, they won’t support anything that made thous changes. And don’t say you can override all classes by special functionality that build by Magento specially for these cases, you know how hard to maintain code of more than 20,000 files? Even if you follow this procedure that will be really hard to restrict this change for everybody else. Say bye to support and Welcome to angry society of developers on their forums who try to help each other.

Enterprise

That was nice concept for dreaming, reality hard to find module that was build for special models of EE, most of the modules doesn’t work.

 

EAV

 

Be afraid, totally flexible attribute system. You say “huh, that cool, should be very nice you can add all these fields on fly”. No and No, you will pay for flexibility by incredibly large queries that are specially prepared by “wonderful” Mage+Zend ORM system. By large I mean 10-20 joins, by “wonderful” I  mean nice super over-design model system, where you spend hours just to find right line of code.

EAV - will be last word of dying database.

 

Maintain and customize

 

SUCKS!!!!! Thats most sucky part of Magento, you will find yourself in instant developers hell, trying to answer question: Why it did like that? 

Every custom change create some problems and when you try to find why, then you can spend tons of ours. Never and never try to do migration script for products using Magento models, better try to extend their model with more simplified MySQL quires just by reaching Zend adapter.

 

Deadlocks everywhere, and thank you cache

 

Without nice setup of caching and really hard use of it, you can close project and just go and find another job. Hard build transactions that locks most frequent queried database - thats your life. The idea that popular products can be added to cart more than 1 time per 5-20 sec didn’t reach mind of Magento developers, it just didn’t played like that. Cache solves amount of load of database so locks are processed faster, but what happen when you get more? 

 

Thats notes from real use Magento on big projects. I would probably not recommend to develop on this. But for small shops that will have 1-4,000 users, it should work fine, pray for that.