This magento gig we took on in the hopes of easily adding ecommerce to c5 has turned into a monster that has consumed all our time for months. The good news is we are heading into alpha testing on it now and in the next few weeks we should be able to put some more attention into adding stuff to the marketplace, releasing the next version of the core, etc.

I apologize for being unable to give this stuff our entire attention right now - we'd very much like to and rest assured your contributions are appreciated and its killing us to be unable to respond to the community faster.

I remember you guys posting a poll on it, trying to decide whether to roll your own or integrate with another cart. So you did end up integrating with Magento? My brief experience is that Magnento is indeed a beast, I'm not surprised it turned into a monster... =)

I think a fully baked concrete5 targeted cart (using concrete5's interpretation of mvc) is better than trying to integrate both of the systems in a way that is seamless :).

I personally think concrete5 provides a lot of tangible elements and hooks to extend to build ecommerce from(even including application events etc), and even though writing a shopping cart from "scratch" sucks, i think it might be best to have it as a first class citizen (for lack of a better term) to concrete5). Again just my opinion but i haven't heard much in the way of ease of use w/ magento. It seems like trying to play connect4 with Mr. T in a headlock and trying to forcibly make him hit the right combos.

Then again that's just me :)

Magento does what magento does well. it's huge, it's got every feature anyone ever thought about, and most of em work in strange ways. It really feels like what I would associate with Java development... fine for something huge that's all about selling products, but I get why they didn't bother with CMS.

I'm also not a fan of the enterprise version thing they just did. Now magento enterprise costs 9k/year which is a weird price point to me. (too much for our audience that balks at $255 for ecommerce, not enuf for a fortune 1000 company to take seriously.) I know we're selling stuff in our marketplace now, so I don't quite have the moral highground I once did, but we're keeping our core free and big, good ideas are still going into it. The stuff we're charging for are simply extra frills like an image gallery, which as you guys know there are a number of ways to do yourself if $15 is too rich for your blood.

So yes, we are going to build ecommerce on our own. No it wont be free. Yes it wont be 9k/year. No it wont have every feature that magento does, but yes, it will be something thats more flexible and fun to use..

Oh, and I promise we WILL get through the marketplace add-on and theme submissions we've been getting as we head into July here and get out of this never ending gig.

thanks for the love everyone..

Well, thanks for giving it a try. That information about Magento is interesting.

Personally, I'm going to try foxycart sometime soon and see how that works out. I know that there are mixed reviews on it but I think the price is right and might be adequate for most small sellers needs.

The company that I work for has been working for months on a special Rails based ecommerce app. Development has been slow going, so I feel your pain. :( They tried to mod a cart plug-in and eventually wound up going with a build from scratch since that plug-in was a little wacked. Albeit, the app has to do things definitely non-standard as far as ecom goes (i can't publicly say what that is).

However, they are extending the app from a centralized domain capable of being inserted via REST into almost any site for fairly seamless integration. I don't know a lot more about it since I'm not a hardcore programmer. We'll see how that goes...

Perhaps, C5 could offer something similar?

P.S. If you can, could you tell us what add-on's are in queue? Knowing that might save some people from trying to develop them on their own.

Franz, why don't you release this stuff to the beta crew? I'd be happy to test new blocks..

It's a bit annoying as a developer if you want to help a community but your stuff never gets published.

Do you remember? a member of the swiss c5 group wrote a simple but useful Google AdSense block. A few months ago....

You called the marketplace "your baby". Make sure it gets some food every once a while (:

Hi Remo,

I've posted the packages to the beta forum. Keen to hear thoughts.