A Crack in the Armor
by Jonathan Moody
It’s been almost two months now since we went live with our first Magento Commerce site.
Over all, I think it has been a real success story. There have been a few bugs, and some customer inquiries, but not as many as I expect with the first implementation of a new technology.
We have been more flexible in addressing problems and implementing solutions since the rollout, and that looks to continue.
However, I seem to have found the first major flaw with the Magento framework.
We have 27 custom modules, where we rewrite core code, implement new functionality, and configure the system. Many of the changes are relatively trivial, but a few are core to the customer experience. It is great how easy Magento is to customize, but it is these custom modules that now present us with our first problem: Magento doesn’t provide a way to say which set of modules are being used for a particular website or store. You can configure the output to be disabled for a module at the website or store level, but the rewrites, observers, and other back end code are all still active. I have been in contact with Magento Enterprise support, consulting groups we have relationships with, and of course the standard Google, and nothing has led me to an out of the box solution for this.
So as we start down the path of ramping up additional sites and stores, we will have to pay particular architectural attention to how we implement custom code that we might not want to have executed on all of our sites.
I am still very pleased with our decision to implement Magento, but no product is perfect…
