[Twirrim]

Urgh. It has been several years now since I last had to deal with Magento, and nothing I've seen over the years suggests it has got any better.

At the time, the final product was arguably a case of code that is far too split up, resulting in quite some system penalties. I get the advantage of developing that way, but I wonder if they'd have been served better by somehow writing stuff to combine libraries together for the final releases product.

Even loading the landing page on a default website used to require loading hundreds of PHP scripts. I was absolutely gobsmacked the metrics I was getting out of APC.

[chjohasbrouck]

> Urgh. It has been several years now since I last had to deal with Magento, and nothing I've seen over the years suggests it has got any better.

One of their biggest vendors, WebShopApps, happened to write a pretty scathing open letter to Magento yesterday if you're interested:

http://webshopapps.com/blog/2017/01/what-magento-should-spen...

This is a company that just a year ago was making almost all of its revenue off of the Magento platform, and they are one of the most-respected brands in that community. Not a good sign for Magento.

[benmarks]

We're nothing if not blessed by a vocal community, many of whom - like Karen - have their livelihoods as well as the livelihoods of employees to look after.

Karen raises some valid points. Others have raised some additional points as well as counterpoints:

* Kalen Jordan (Co-host of MageTalk podcast, MageMail.co creator, CommerceHero.io founder): https://blog.commercehero.io/response-1ee004f6d3c7

* Joshua Warren (CEO of Creatuity, a Magento partner agency): http://www.joshuawarren.com/blog/2017/1/5/magento-2-in-2017-...

* Paul Byrne (President of Razoyo, a non-partner Magento agency): https://www.razoyo.com/blog/2017/01/07/2017-starts-rage-apol...

If anyone reading this thread is curious about Magento in 2017, I recommend to check them out as well.

[navs]

I've had the fortune of meeting Karen, who wrote that blog piece, and know how frustrated she's been.

I work with Magento everyday and what she says of a disparity between community and the enterprise agenda is ever so apparent.

Promises can only take you so far.

[ehnto]

There is a completely re-written Magento 2 out now, in case you were curious.

I have high hopes for it's future as it has some great minds behind it, but unfortunately at the moment it has some very key usability issues for developers and they are still making grand architectural changes to some components in a not so friendly fashion, so it is hard to iron those issues out yourself.

It is still an incredibly complex and cumbersome beast, and I suspect that will never change. But for complex and cumbersome business requirements it's strict structure and modularity make it a good fit.

It also has the benefit of being one of the few module/plugin ecosystems where it isn't a race to the bottom, as good idiomatic plugins are hard enough to build that it keeps lowballers uninterested and bad modules will fail a sniff test pretty quickly.

Source: Full time Magento dev.

[Intermernet]

Magento have had a bug in 2.1 Since September last year which they still don't seem to have fixed which basically breaks any 3rd party import / export / sync[1].

Not only that, but it was assigned an "internal jira ticket" near the end of October and there hasn't been any further notification since.

This isn't an isolated incident. They spend a lot of money on marketing and conferences, yet the developer community seem to get less feedback than a one-person open-source labor-of-love provides. It's obvious (and has been for years) that Magento are really about the Enterprise version, and the Open Source version is really just a tip of the hat to their original legacy.

I still do consultation for it, but I no longer recommend it. I actually now actively suggest that people looking for ecommerce solutions look elsewhere.

[benmarks]

Curious, where do you suggest they look? FWIW I'm all for getting merchants and their tech teams on the right platform for them - no solution works for everyone.

As for us (Magento): Our velocity in handling GitHub issues and PRs for M2 has been really, really slow. This is partly due to the volume of reports, and partly due to some inefficiency in our own house. We're fortunate that we have a huge, engaged community who have continued to be patient with us - however, we know that patience has worn thin. People have work to do! Merchants have customers to please!

Starting a couple of months ago, the factors around this have started to change for the better. We've dedicated a large portion of our team to working on issue support, and I've been having calls & conversations this week which indicate further shifts for the better.

In the next week or so, I (@benmarks) and/or our new SVP of Product & Technology (Jason Woosley - @jasonwoosley_mg) will post more about the current state as well as upcoming changes.

Hopefully in the future you will be able to recommend Magento 2 when appropriate. Of course, it is on us to demonstrate real improvement.

In the meantime, my inbox is always open: [e-mail]

[Intermernet]

Thanks for the reply Ben.

Regarding your question, I hate to say it, but out of my recommendations most of my clients are tending towards either Woo or Shopify. I actually personally prefer Magento for most reasons, and still have clients who are happily trading with M1, both OS and Enterprise, but the customers on M2 feel that they've been burnt by the constant show-stopper bugs (mostly in regards to integration with other systems).

I really hope that I'll be able to start recommending M2 to clients again, as I've worked with Magento for many years and I know the system well. I feel it gets a lot of things right, but the M2 bugs have been frankly embarrassing, and have led to uncomfortable conversations with clients where I have to explain that yes, the old M1 site worked perfectly, but the new site that they're spending money on still has 3 month old bugs that I can't provide an update on, or even an ETA for resolution.

I look forward to Magento hopefully fixing the major issues with M2 in the near future.

P.S. I realised that I didn't actually post the URL to the bug I mentioned in my previous post. It's https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/6683 ("Products updated_at field is not updating on save") which seems related to a couple of other bugs pertaining to "updated_at" fields not being modified.

[benmarks]

From what I can tell, it's in the high priority backlog. Hopefully that means some progress along with... lots of other things. But, let's wait until we have some demonstrated burn down before we pop champagne.