DISCLAIMER: This is only the humble
opinion of a single Magento user, and is intended as an opinion piece and not
meant to be taken as an authoritative review of the platform. Maybe someone out
there has had a better experience with the platform than I have. Instead, adult
profanities follow. Lots of them.
Hey everyone! How are ya’ll doing on
this lovely afternoon?
Fine and dandy? That’s good.
Guess what I spent most of a month
working on?
A Magento site!
How was it you ask? Well…
FUCK
YOU Magento!
You’re the least user-friendly,
arrogant piece-of-shit web platform I have ever had the displeasure of using.
You’ve caused me countless hours of migraine inducing, head-scratching, what
the fuck moments that I had no intention, or expectation, of having to contend
with. Because of your single-handed inept, horseshit way of magically
generating errors out of thin air, I’ve not only seriously considered, but
already taken steps to get out of the web design business altogether. Go fuck
yourself, you piece of shit platform! Why, oh why, didn’t I sign up for some
other e-com platform instead?
WHYYYYYY?!
That wasn’t me just now. That was
some other angry person.
Phew, now that that’s out of the
way, where the gosh-darned heck do I actually begin to describe the nightmare
using this platform has become for myself and everyone else who has ever
touched it?
For those of you out of the know,
Magento is the world’s largest, most popular e-commerce web platform.
Right out of the box, this system
pretends that it’s the bees-knees of e-commerce. It’s big, it’s got features,
it’s got a community and it’s got a price-tag.
Everything about it reeks of
confidence to the point of big corporation arrogance; but if a platform has
been around for a decade with some of the biggest names in commerce using it,
you would expect a smaller site might be able to reap the benefits that only a
robust platform like Magento could offer?
Wrong motherfucker! AMBUSH!
I’m sure there are good things about
Magento, somewhere, hidden in that deep, dark pit of despair, but in reality
whatever good this platform can offer is in every way overshadowed by its
error-ready inherently broken core architecture.
It’s honestly as if every single
piece of this behemoth was built from the ground up using psycho-logic and with
the sole intention of causing psychological trauma to the poor saps who end up
using it for development.
Exhibit A – The Magento import and export functions are dogshit.
In a normal world, when you export
and then import something from the same damn site (like taking socks out of a
drawer and then putting them back in) you expect them to work / be accepted /
import (you expect the mutherfucking socks to fit in the mutherfucking
drawer!).
With Magento, I exported the entire
catalogue from our site, and then attempted to re-import it back to the same
site.
The only difference was that we
moved the domain; every single other facet, from attributes, to categories, to
currencies, was the exact same.
Then, when I imported them, lo and
behold, over 15 000 errors! WTF?!
After checking the spreadsheet, it
turns out that it was indeed filled with errors – errors that Magento
arbitrarily decided to fill it with!
Why would a system’s own built-in
import and export function fuck itself like that? It’s like after unloading a
bag of fresh groceries in the fridge, closing the fridge, and then opening it
to find a gaggle of geese fly out at high speeds type of insanity.
The best part? After I fixed all
15,000 errors BY HAND, uploaded them and got the perfect green checkmark of
“everything works”… nothing actually worked!
In the back end, everything was
there, fine and looking good. Products were active, on the right site, in the
right categories EXCEPT they weren’t appearing on the front end.
Not. One. Of. Them.
After a good 10 hours of
troubleshooting, it turns out that 99% of the products magically didn’t work,
and would never work. The other 1% could, but they got imported with the
“enabled” switch turned to “disabled” for some mysterious
reason.
I tried switching the others to
disabled in the hope that they would work, but no dice.
The only way they worked was to copy
paste each individual bit of info from that spreadsheet into the product
creator… oh, a good couple thousand times.
Exhibit B – In Magento, Errors Appear and then Magically Disappear.
I went into the theme template and
disabled every sidebar widget save for a recently viewed products list. I
tested it, and it worked… but that was yesterday.
Today, after having added a few more
pages to the CMS, updated the store logo and added some images to the home
page, etc. (standard stuff) I went to look over with the products and happened
to notice the recent product list wasn’t appearing.
I go to the back end, check, and
it’s enabled? WTF?
I enable other widgets and they all
work, but not the one goddamn widget I want!? FUUUUUU!
Guess I won’t be using that goddamn widget this time around!
Exhibit
C – Can I change the Store Logo in Magento Anymore? Anyone?
From the back-end, the only way to
upload a media file is through loading up an individual page editor in the CMS
section and pretending to insert a file but only going so far as browsing.
Once there, I dumped the logo file
into the EXACT SAME directory as the default placeholder and saved. I went to
the theme settings, changed the name of the file on the path and then bingo it…
wait? WTF!? It’s still the old logo?!
To cut that piece of shit story
short, it turns out changing the filepath does nothing – the only way to change
the logo was to manually overwrite the placeholder file with the new logo and
then go.
Pro-tip: changing the file name in
the core database doesn’t even work – other magical nonsense happens… I don’t
recommend you try it, ever.
Hmm why not just have an image
uploader built into the settings where I can simply upload my logo file and the
system takes care of it?
You know… like the GODDAMN FAVICON
has?!
But no, that would make sense, and
Magento isn’t a fan of having to explain itself.
Final
Remarks about using Magento?
As far as I can tell, the only way to make Magento inherently work, to avoid countless migraines that seriously make you question the possible existence of the devil, is to never, EVER, make any changes to any sort of the architecture, template or system, no matter how modest.
Buy a template, and don’t even so
much as change the name of one of the pages. If you so much as do, then be
prepared, well prepared, to enter into a realm of Lovecraftian madness beyond
your deepest, darkest, watery dreams of chaos.
Fuck you Magento, I hate you.
FUN FACT: Two and a half years
later and Magento still sucks! I’ve written a follow-up piece to commemorate
the occasion. Be sure to read about Another Trip Through the Inferno: Magento.
This post was slightly updated in
2014, 2016, and 2019.