[KingPin]

I have a teleconference lined up next week with them so I have not been in contact with them "yet".

I do agree that the support seems a little lack luster and that is a worry to a certain degree.

The thing that I have found so far is from a free "almost" ready to go cart it has the foundations for potential for it to be an extremely good e-commerce platform.

The guy who does my custom carts said its one of the best free carts he has ever worked with and it really doesn't need all that much work doing on it for it to be "complete".

I'm just taking his word for it because he is a super geek and excellent at what he does.

For what you get with Magento, some of paid solutions are not as good, no where near so if it's not a major job, I will get him to complete the cart and it can be ready to roll.

This, for our small businesses that need a professional, solid cart is a good, cost effective alternative.

I probably do more e-commerce SEO/SEM than anything else and from that side of things, it's pretty good and again, has massive potential.

I don't know how the convocation will go but I know when we put it into production we will have out own support forum for clients that are powered by Magento.

KP

[Jeewhizz]

Interesting thread I believe it's based on the Zend Framework, which is very nice

[meader83]

I'm experimenting with Magento at the moment, installed it fine, but im finding it pretty tricky to use with my limited(very) knowledge in this area.

Are there any good books/guides etc out there anyone could recommend to get me up and running are there easier ecommerce pacages out there to try

[zharlene]

I just installed a test on the servers I'm using. This seems to be an awesome software, I've tested quite a bit of ecommerce open source softwares in the past and this is just...wow.

Although Moneybookers doesn't seem to be an available payment method (*sobs*).

[crackingmedia]

Originally Posted by zharlene

I just installed a test on the servers I'm using. This seems to be an awesome software, I've tested quite a bit of ecommerce open source softwares in the past and this is just...wow.

Although Moneybookers doesn't seem to be an available payment method (*sobs*).

Let's have a good cry together!

I would be interested to hear how your Magento system is running speedwise. Is it installed on your own dedicated web server or a shared server environment? Our experience which has been confirmed by others is that on a shared server the initial load of a site takes 20-30 seconds, but on a dedicated server (which is not feasible for many businesses) it works just fine.

Greg raised another issue earlier about the way the system handles VAT for UK sites.

It would be interesting to know if the Magento development team have resolved both of these issues.

[zharlene]

It loads within a few seconds for me, I'm on a shared server (my demo is on 4sur.com, can someone pls. tell me if it takes just a few seconds for you?).

I had a hard time installing the software, I had to do the cgi-bin install.

[nass]

9.29 seconds for me

Have a play with combining the 5 style sheets, it makes a nice difference. When I amalgamated everything including the initial reset it literally shaved seconds off my site.

[zharlene]

Thanks for the tip, I'll try it out! To be honest, I barely looked at the template, the admin panel isn't as easy as it seems!

[crackingmedia]

6.36s in Firefox which is a lot quicker than what we experienced when we tested it. But that is still slow considering the amount of page content.

[nass]

Zharlene, have a look at adding a browser plugin called firebug onto your firefox if you use it. If you have that and another plugin called yslow it gives a great indicator of what things are causing a page to be slow.