Mynxx (Virtuemart) or Magneto(Mynxx) ?
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- KMGDESIGN
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 259
- Thanks: 0
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Hello!
Mynxx (Virtuemart) or Magneto(Mynxx), thats the question. What do you think is the better system for an shop with round about 1000 articles?
Is Mynxx with the Joomla 1.5.24 and Virtuemart 'old school'?
Is Magneto 'state of art'?
What would be your decision?
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- gruntled
- Newbie
- Posts: 3
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I am an IT pro - more management/integration than development and an experienced web developer. I just finished my latest website for a surgery/wellness center with over 120 static pages and last year implemented a complete Magento site for a store with over 7000 items - but I am not fluent in php.
Virtuemart (VM) has a handicap that Magento does not. Magento is its own framework and expects everyone to stay up to speed with its revisions and gives them the tools to do so (not without some major headaches but nevertheless it happens.) Developers who program additional functionality are not in lock-step with the revisions but they come up to speed fairly quickly. VM on the other hand struggles to keep in sync with the framework (Joomla!) it needs to function. It has no influence or control over what the Joomla! developers release. Developers who program additional functionality lag farther behind as they have to wait to see what the VM crowd develops and releases. VM is responsible for its own upgrade path but that path is greatly influenced by the Joomla! group. But I ramble.
Magento is a tough program - to install - to configure - to use....it is massive and requires a server with a fair amount of horsepower -- but it is very complete. Everything you need is available right there on the Magento site...and anyone can create a functioning store with everything working without spending a penny for anything except the infrastructure (hosting). Templates are not much of an issue with Magento as the default freebies are very complete and any bells and whistles are fairly easy to download and install from the store.
Again, it is my opinion, but the Magento development community seems to be far more concerned with functionality and real-world modeling than VM is. The VM community seems obsessed with minor variation in the look and feel of the store and seem to leave all responsibility for its functionality to a small group of core developers who seem to be very overworked.
It is not documented, but Magento is just coming out of a major reorganization of their website. User forums containing a lot of hints and solutions that I relied on were taken down. Tool access was restructured and to be honest, as one of the freebie users I didn't get the warm and fuzzies. I believe they are now coming back stronger and better but....
I started doing some digging around the internet and I liked the things I was hearing about Virtuemart. I am starting a new site using Virtuemart and I am hopeful but I also am approaching this with a great deal of trepidation.
I like the goals that VM has set for itself with version 2 but am fearful that since an official release has not been made yet, support will lag behind as well. Their road-map is ambitious and had many listed features that, in my limited understanding, hoped would be usable. Things like price reductions based on age of item, vendor support, templates based on categories all seemed like things I was lacking in Magento. I now have the impression that many of their goals will not be realized for a while yet.
Nevertheless, what I know to be true is there are many functioning Virtuemart stores out there and if they can make it work, I can too.
So here I am. After looking at many of the Joomla! Templates that support Virtuemart and the various Virtuemart themes, I have selected Mynxx here by RocketTheme. It was not an overwhelming choice but I am hopeful it was a good one. If anyone cares, I will try and relate my progress setting up this store with VM119k....and I will be keeping an eye on VM2.
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- KMGDESIGN
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 259
- Thanks: 0
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hi, and thank you for this exposure!
I spend the last two weeks with VM with absolutly no problems. Everything works from the first moment with the RT-launcher. There are some design feature which have to be upgraded to an 'mondern' shop look (article previews and sizes) from the core developers. I think. ...
And some things aren´t state of art. (i´m looking for different 'featured' product categories. i can´t find an possibility in the backend)
The server performance is okay without any extensions.
After the installation (Mynxx-Jooma) you´ll find an normal count of files in your database. After the 'Magneto' installation you find 5 times more records in the db. There are one of the differences. .. ..
The last days im going to check the new 'Magneto' installation, looking around in the forum and here in the club for different meanings and impressions. There aren´t a lot of 'free' answers without of paying for. ...
I´m not able to start the free Rt-Mynxx-Magneto application. The backend seemed to be okay, the frontpage in the frontend starts and look correct. Every click produce an mistake. i`m going crazy. .... Nobody here can tell me about 'files and folder' permissions. ... urggs! I can`t believe it to set them all to '777'. I use the 'magneto-cleanup.php' script with no satisfaction. .... This is really frustrating.
...but i need an 'state of art system'.
I`m not an 'IT-PRO', i`m only an designer without any php-knowlege!
(and sorry for my bad english!)
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- ladbroke
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 166
- Thanks: 4
- I would thoroughly recommend Magento. I have recently finished a store ( my first store using Magento), and I love it. There is a steep learning curve, but in my opinion one worth taking. As for errors, and things not functioning as they should, a lot of this could be down to hosting. I used to use 1&1, and for ages I wanted to swap hosts, but couldn't be bothered. Using Magento it soon became apparent that the 1&1 package I had wasn't suitable, so I switched to Hostgator, and they have been very good. I do believe that Magento has recently been purchased by Ebay, so this bodes well for Ebay integration too. If you use Joomla a lot, you will be used to lots of free extensions. That isn't the case with Magento, there are free extensions, just nowhere near as many as Joomla.
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- gruntled
- Newbie
- Posts: 3
- Thanks: 0
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Just a quick follow up. If anyone cares, I am using a GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated Server and got a bit caught in a detour. I hope those of you out there are smarter than I am.
Like anyone else who has purchased an account at RocketThemes it has given me access to the entire Joomla library of templates allowing me to pick any one to actually implement. I stumbled across Mercado and really liked it, especially as there were versions for both Joomla15 as required by current Virtuemart and Joomla17 the future Virtuemart) so I downloaded it and installed it. The RocketLauncher worked fine except the category images on the home page were blank - not a problem since I was more interested in usability than anything.
I read the documentation and saw it interfaced with different ecommerce solutions but didn't really understand it - my ignorance and not a fault of the documentation. I tried to install Virtuemart into it with no success and was additionally surprised to see it was a functioning store without it. Then everything clicked - it was not a VM product and I proceeded to explore the capabilities of Ecwid, Tienda and Redshop which surprisingly in my search for ecommerce solutions, never came up on my radar.
For my needs I ruled out Ecwid fairly quickly as it did not appear to have the necessary management tools or features to support the size of the inventory with which I would be dealing. I wanted to give Tienda a try and their website says they offer a limited free license but I couldn't find it. Redshop and Tienda are still possibilities I would like to explore on a test basis but my gut instinct is that somewhere down the road I am going to want direct access to the data for my own reporting purposes and these are down roads I do not want to travel.
I want to say that as a user who contributes very little to the ecommerce development world and who takes advantage of a lot of hard work of others and am only entitled to "get what I pay for", I sincerely appreciate all their work and what they make available on the web for little or no cost. That being said, what all of the downloadable ecommerce packages lack and that I desperately need is a some sort of backend stock/vendor reporting package.
The business model I am working with utilizes a traditional brick-and-mortar store where the items in the store are also sold on the web, where a vendor who's product I am selling does not get paid until his item is sold, and where at any point in time I can export and print a report of items sold and items remaining in the store by vendor. I have not found this in the public domain yet. Virtuemart 2 alluded to this capability but I do not see any evidence of it in the initial release. There are major disclaimers against using Vendors in VM 1.19 and I ignored them only to find that featured items will only be displayed if they are associated with the default vendor.
So... I have abandoned Mercado and have decided to simultaneously install and explore Magento (again as I did successfully use this last year to create a store) and VM 1.19 with RoocketTheme's Mynxx Template and Theme since I already paid for it. For the record, the installation has not gone well. The furthest I've gotten is using the Mynxx RocketLauncher, clicking Install Sample Data, followed by Virtuemart but there are no images and trying to install the Mynxx VM Theme crashes (is it already included in RocketLauncher?) with "Server error. The website encountered an error while retrieving www.xxxxxxxx.com/administrator/index.php . It may be down for maintenance or configured incorrectly."
For those of you installing Magento, do not disregard the system requirements. On my Godaddy VDS, mcrypt was not installed (Centos Linux) and I had to install it. I am comfortable using the Linux Shell with supervisor rights and encourage everyone to do the same. Always make backups first! I had previously updated my PHP and recommend this link for those needing to do the same.
raphaelhahn.com/2010/12/magento-on-godaddy-vds/
Follow all of the steps in the order presented.
There are some unnecessary commands but they will basically do nothing with responses like "nothing to do" or "can't find that".
The command: yum install php-mcrypt*
was what worked for me and was missing in several other posts I found which said to use
yum install mcrypt*
which did nothing.
Enough for now. Thanks for taking the time to read this and good luck.
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- Sam Mahoney
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 7420
- Thanks: 222
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Regarding VirtueMart vs Magento, main thing to note is that VirtueMart is an extension for a CMS that lets you have some store functions, and Magento is a full blown store. You can get a better idea of the main differences here -
www.cabiritech.com/ecommerce/virtuemart-magento-comparison/
It really comes down to the size of the store - if it's only a few products, then maybe VirtueMart might be the way to go as you already have experience with Joomla. But if it's for a lot of products, you'll want something more dedicated to ecommerce, so Magento is definitely the way to go in that case. - STEP 1 IN MAGENTO DEVELOPMENT - DISABLE YOUR CACHE OR YOU WON'T SEE ANY CHANGES.
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