For anyone who hasn't heard of it yet, Magento is a new open source shopping cart solution that looks as if it's going to take the industry by storm. It's due for release later this month.

Have a look at this video by Roy Rubin CEO of Varien

http://www.magentocommerce.com/ecomm...nterviewee=roy

As soon as I hear of an official launch date I'll post the details here.

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Lawrence

I've added a news feed from Magento so you will know when they announce it's release. It's a sub cat of the Magento cat, you'll find it above the thread list.

It updates every 30mins, so you'll know the latest developments very shortly after they are announced.

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Lawrence

Just had a look at this. I really like the look of the sneak preview of the admin panel, shall put my second store on hold until this goes live I think

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Childrens Fancy Dress Costumes and Party Dresses
Childrens Costumes and Dancewear

The video of the CEO inspires confidence too. You can see that they aren't some cowboy outfit, they mean business.

If it works as well as it looks. then it's going to be the business!

I can't wait to get my hands on it,

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Lawrence

The admin panel looks good, but have you seen the category view?

Magento Behind the Scenes: Category Pages

If it looks that good out of the box and works half as well as it looks then it could end up leaving the other open source carts standing.

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Lawrence

It looks spectacular! I'm a CubeCart user at the moment, but visually Magento blows it away (and unlike CubeCart it's open source). Does anybody know whether they be including a PayPal UK gateway - I couldn't find any reference to this on the site?

I've never used CubeCart so I can't compare the two. I've had the Magenta Beta installed since last Friday and I'm blown away by it. It's the best eCommerce S/W I've ever used. The don't have a PayPal UK Gateway for it yet, but I'd be shocked if they don't have it in place when the first production version is released early next year. They have a growing community of 3rd party developers already so you can expect to see some add-ons for it in the next few months.

BTW Welcome to the forum.

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Lawrence

I am about to re-launch a Client's ecommerce site but having trouble deciding on oscommerce, zen or magento. Love the look and feel of magento but worried it may not be completely baked yet. Is anybody here actively using it and if so, what are your thoughts and recommendation please.

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What's Your Genuine Site Rank?

Magento is still in Beta, so I wouldn't advise using it in a production environment yet. They expect v1 to be available Q1 2008 so if you can hang on until then, it might be worth giving it a go, though I imagine it'll still have one or two bugs that'll still need to be ironed out even then.

If I was going to start a new store now, I would use Zen, if I was planning to start one next year then I would use Magento.

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Lawrence

Thanks Lawrence. Looking on the forums over at Magento, I'm beginning to see what you mean; lots of talk about memory usage and performance problems with the current preview version. I don't have 3 months to wait, so I guess Zen Cart will make the most sense. Too bad though, because Magento promises to have a ton of features other open source solutions are missing: product image zoom, product ratings, related products, etc.

Also, when you look at most sites currently using Zen, I'm sorry but most just look so darn ugly and like they were designed in 1999.

I would hate to set everything up using Zen Cart and then redo it again in 6 months or so when Magento hopefully becomes stable, but for now looks like there may be no other option.

Anyway, thank a lot for your advice!

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What's Your Genuine Site Rank?

A lot of Zen templates are based on the default one which isn't the most awe inspiring template out there, though there are some very good ones available that make it difficult to tell that it's a Zen store at first glance.

I don't think you'll have too many difficulties importing your stock from Zen to Magento when it's finished. They are going to want to build their userbase very quickly, and with their initial target market being other OS cart users, they are obviously going to target pre-existing Zen, OSC and CRELoaded users, so the obvious way to do this will be to make it easy for them to import their inventory from their current stores.

If they don't create a DB importer from Zen to Magento, you can guarantee that someone else will.

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Lawrence

http://www.zencarttemplates.info/hoff.php
Url above shows what can be achieved using custom
designed zencart templates..especially i.e.
http://www.mitea.com/index.php

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and
Unusual and Special Gifts

does it have many bugs then? i cant even get it to install right and my server is compatible hmm...

The majority of bugs have been fixed but they're still ironing out the last few before releasing a production version.

Most people I came across on the Mag forums who had installation problems were either missing required PHP libraries, using PHP4, didn't have mod_rewrite enabled or had problems with file permissions.

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Lawrence

Well, visually magento looks the best cart. Stock wise that is. Any cart can be made to look good.

What lets magento down is its options/features/customisability (that a new word i just made up? ;P).

Its got nothing over zen cart in my opinion. Give magento a few years to catch up.