Developer(s) Magento Inc. Operating system | Written in PHP | |
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Initial release March 31, 2008; 8 years ago (2008-03-31) Stable release Community edition 2.1.3 / Enterprise edition 2.1.3 / December 16, 2016 (2016-12-16) Repository magento.com/tech-resources/download | ||
Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP. The software was originally developed by Varien Inc., a US private company headquartered in Culver City, California, with assistance from volunteers.
Contents
- History
- Overview
- Magento Community Edition
- Magento Enterprise Edition
- Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition ECE
- Magento 2
- Security concerns
- Magento Events Worldwide
- Certification
- References
Varien published the first general-availability release of the software on March 31, 2008. Roy Rubin, former CEO of Varien, later sold a substantial share of the company to eBay, which eventually completely acquired and then spun off the company.
According to the research conducted by AheadWorks in May 2015, Magento's market share among the 30 most popular e-commerce platforms is about 29.8%.
On November 17, 2015, Magento 2.0 was released, with an aim to provide new ways to heighten user engagement, smooth navigation, conversion rates and overall revenue generation. It has well-organized business user tools speed up build up time and enhances productivity. Table locking issues have purportedly been considerably reduced, Improved Page Caching and also allows in streamlining Guest checkout process for existing users, Enterprise-grade scalability, inbuilt rich snippets for Structured Data, new file structure with easy customization, CSS Preprocessing using LESS & CSS URL resolver, improved performance and better code base are some of the touted benefits of newer Magento version.
Magento employs the MySQL/MariaDB relational database management system, the PHP programming language, and elements of the Zend Framework. It applies the conventions of object-oriented programming and model–view–controller architecture. Magento also uses the entity–attribute–value model to store data. On top of that, Magento 2 introduced the Model-View-ViewModel pattern to its front-end code using the JavaScript library Knockout.js.
History
Magento officially started development in early 2007. Seven months later, on August 31, 2007, the first public beta version was released.
Varien, the company owning Magento, formerly worked with osCommerce. It had originally planned to fork osCommerce but later decided to rewrite it as Magento.
In February 2011, eBay announced it had made an investment in Magento in 2010, worth a 49% ownership share of the company.
On June 6, 2011, eBay announced that it would be acquiring the rest of Magento, which would join its new X.Commerce initiative. Magento's CEO and co-founder Roy Rubin wrote on the Magento blog that "Magento will continue to operate out of Los Angeles, with Yoav Kutner and me as its leaders.".
Yoav Kutner left Magento in April 2012 citing the vision for Magento having changed since the time of acquisition due to high level staff changes.
As a result of the breakup of eBay following Carl Icahn's raid, Magento was spun out as an independent company by the new owner Permira private equity fund on November 3, 2015.
Overview
Magento is the provider of three distinct platforms, Magento Community Edition, Magento Enterprise Edition and Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition. There were also two former platforms, Magento Professional Edition and Magento Go. Today, some of their largest users are Burger King, Nestle, Murad, BevMo, and Coca-Cola.
Magento Community Edition
Magento Community Edition is an open-source eCommerce platform. Developers can implement the core files and extend its functionality by adding new plug-in modules provided by other developers. Since the first public beta version was released in 2007, Community Edition has been developed and customized in order to provide a basic eCommerce platform.
The current release and each of the previous historical release versions of the 1.X and 2.X version branches of Magento Community Edition are available on the Magento Commerce, Inc. website for download as singe-file downloads Development of the 2.X version branch of Magento CE is coordinated publicly on GitHub.
The latest actively supported versions of Magento Community Edition are CE 1.9.3 and 2.1.5.
Magento Enterprise Edition
Magento Enterprise Edition is derived from the Magento Community Edition and has the same core files. Unlike Community Edition, this is not free, but has more features and functionality. This edition is designed for large businesses that require technical support with installation, usage, configuration, and troubleshooting. Although Magento Enterprise has annual maintenance fees, neither Community nor Enterprise Editions include hosting. The Magento team develops Enterprise Edition by cooperating with users and third parties. Development on the 2.X branch of Magento EE is coordinated publicly on GitHub.
The latest actively supported versions of Magento Enterprise Edition are EE 1.14.2.4 and EE 2.0.4 released on March 31, 2016.
Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition (ECE)
Released April 11, 2016, ECE is a platform as a service that enables rapid deployment of fully customizable, secure and scalable web store fronts, combined with leading hosting and managed infrastructure. In contains a full REST API and a scriptable command line interface ensures ease of integration with external systems and compatibility with existing code management workflows.
Included in ECE is: Fastly a real-time content delivery network that quickly diagnoses speed problems and can make automated changes and also mitigates DDoS attacks. New Relic continuous application performance monitoring. Blackfire.io performance monitoring of PHP code, which provides a visualization of how all your pages work together, enabling users to eliminate redundancies. Amazon Web Services a triple redundant cloud cluster with 99.99% uptime and best in class SLA benchmarks. Magento Enterprise Edition, which is an open platform with near unlimited options for campaign workflows, product attributes, customer segments, product pages, web pages, and checkout.
Magento 2
Magento 2 has many new and improved features, developer tools and its architecture is quite different from all the previous versions. Magento 2 was announced in 2010. It was planned for release in 2011, and its merchant beta version was released in July 2015. Since then Magento 1 and Magento 2 have existed simultaneously.
Like previous platform, Magento 2 consists of both frontend and backend (or Admin Panel). The backend of Magento 2 is much more intuitive and friendly. The menu is vertical on the left instead of horizontal menu on the top in Magento 1, and is designed with flat type. The Dashboard of backend now emphasizes more at Lifetime Sales and Average Order, highlight both Lifetime Sales and Revenue. Everything is bigger, much easier to click.
The frontend has new features. The default theme is Magento 2 Luma Theme which is much better than Magento 1. Also, Magento 2 has responsive web design and faster performance theme. New 2-step checkout is not as complicated as default 6-step checkout of Magento 1.
Security concerns
In 2015 it was reported that outdated or unpatched Magento web stores are susceptible to Cross-site scripting attack, which allow attackers to perform online skimming to steal user credit card information. According to a security expert, more than 4000 Magento web stores were vulnerable to such an attack in October 2016.
Magento Events Worldwide
"Imagine eCommerce" is the annual Magento eCommerce conference that has run since 2011. The first event was held in February 2011 in Los Angeles with more than 600 Magento merchants, partners, and developers. The goals of the “Imagine eCommerce” are sharing ecommerce ideas and providing networking opportunity sessions.
Besides Imagine, Magento also cooperates with local teams to set up a so-called "Magento Live" event in which the participants will have fantastic opportunities to learn more about the platform, ecommerce and which news has got in store for Magento merchants. The biggest event of Magento Live is Magento Live in Australia (Sydney), Magento Live UK or Magento Live France. The latest event calendar of Magento & Ecommerce worldwide in 2017 has been recaptured by Redbox Digital team.
There is one non-profit organization which contributes up to more than 24 Magento events global per year named "The Meet Magento Association" The association is open to all companies who are active in any form of commerce or distribution and who are and want using Magento commerce now or in future. They also run a big project called Localized Magento Edition where they get supported from the local Magento agency to transform Magento default to localized edition with native language and business norms. The project has been run on all developed market of Magento like Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Russia and also Vietnam - a "rising dragon" for ecommerce trading in Asia with the support from Magestore - A Silver Technology Partner of Magento.
Certification
There are four different Magento certifications. Three of them aim to prove developers' competency in implementing modules; one (Certified Solution Specialist) targets business users (consultants, analysts, project managers). Magento Front End Developer Certification is mainly focused on improving the user interface (UI) of built-in applications. This certification is related with templates, layouts, Javascript, and CSS. Magento Developer certification is geared toward back end developers who implement the core modules. The Plus certification tests deep understanding of Magento Enterprise modules and the entire architecture.