Five years ago, I had the shittiest month of my life. I was stuck doing a web project where the client chose to use Magento for their little store.
It was supposed to be a quick and easy gig. Launch their site, import their files from an older domain using a spreadsheet, and let her rip.
How did working with Magento go for me?
I spent hundreds of hours troubleshooting motherfucking bugs and bullshit that don’t exist in any platform except for that hell hole. And because I quoted by the project and not the hour, I ended up making around $4.00 per hour on that shit (if I round up).
Working with Magento was so awful that one project caused me to quit doing websites for people. Cold-turkey. Nada. Zilch. Finito. Not a single site since.
How’s that for a product review to cap off the night?
If only it were so simple.
I revisited that nightmare of working with Magento again a couple years ago, after realizing that the people making, marketing and selling that steaming pile of dog shit that calls itself an ecommerce platform, had literally addressed NONE of the problems myself and hundreds of other developers faced.
Not a single fucking one. Instead of addressing them, they released a turd called Magento 2. They promised it would be lean, developer friendly, and not a mouth full of garbage.
They lied. Oh, how they lied.
While I have fortunately never had to touch that cat’s ass of poison, dozens of developers personally commented on my blog, emailed me, etc. to tell me that yes indeed, Magento was back to its same old bag of dirty tricks.
Why am I not surprised?
Magento Inc. is a behemoth. They make assloads (that’s metric for a lot) of money with their shitty product, worse extensions, hideous plugins, and god awful templates.
Isn’t that what a business does? Isn’t that the circle of life?
Actually, when I stop and think about it. I would like to be surprised. I would like to wake up one morning and live in a world where the biggest companies don’t fart around laughing at us.
I’d love to live in a world where products like Magento worked well. And croissants were free. And coffee didn’t give me ulcers.
Hell, products like Magento don’t even have to perform miracles, or even work as well as their competitors like Prestashop, Bigcommerce, Shopify, or even fucking Woocommerce.
Just work “well.” That’s all I ask.
But that’s not the world you and I live in. That’s a world of day dreams and candy canes, where everything tastes like bubblegum and working on the web is a rewarding, wonderful process, and not a purgatory we go through between the end of University until we give up and land a real job.
I realize that at this point, I’ve been vague. I haven’t spoken very much about the “features” of this ecommerce platform. I haven’t talked about specific issues. Maybe I even come across as being mean and unfair to widdle ol’ Magento.
Fuck that. Listing even one “feature” here would be a discredit to every other ecommerce platform.
Testing their fucking platform again would be like giving a part of my soul to the devil in exchange for a jar of broken promises. I don’t need to revisit hell to know it’s a shitty place. Knowing that hell exists is enough.
The same can be said for Magento. As long as that motherfucker is still around, there will be tears and there will be sorrows. There will also be naive young web developers (like my younger self) hoping to land a good contract only to end up with the equivalent of a dagger in their brain as they try to parse through mysteriously broken code.
As long as there is a Magento, there will be an opponent, a monster, a devil, and no web developer will be safe.
So, if you’re a developer considering using this platform, all that needs to be said about Magento is that it is still the biggest piece of shit in Ecommerce.
Stay the fuck away from it.
Consider this is a public service announcement.
