Magento

Magento is a feature-rich e-commerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. It includes flexible product display options, mobile templates, transaction options, multi-store and multi-site functionality, user accounts and loyalty programs, product categorization and shopper filtering, and discount and promotion rules.

Homepage: www.magentocommerce.com

Magento offers flexible, scalable eCommerce solutions designed to help businesses grow and succeed online. The Magento platform is trusted by more than 150,000 businesses, including some of the world's leading brands.

Customers choose Magento because our cost-effective solutions—built on open source technology—enable businesses of all sizes to control and customize the look and feel, content, and functionality of their online stores.

Magento is an open source e-commerce web application that was launched on March 31, 2008. It was developed by Varien (now Magento Inc) with help from the programmers within the open source community but is owned solely by Magento Inc.. Magento was built using the Zend Framework. It uses the entity-attribute-value (EAV) database model to store data.

The Magento Community Edition is the only free version of Magento available.

Magento uses several key coding practices that make the system both versatile and adaptable both as a web platform and as an e-commerce platform.

As an e-commerce platform, Magento allows for features including flexible product display options, mobile templates, transaction options, multi-store and multi-site functionality, user accounts and loyalty programs, product categorisation and shopper filtering, and discount and promotion rules.

As a web platform, Magento uses its own take on the model-view-controller (MVC) model. The differences between the traditional model and Magento's model are the following:

•  The use of a layout file to control what's displayed on each view.   
•  The use of "blocks" that can be inserted into any view easily via the layout.
•  The use of a model re-write system.

Magento is well known in its developer community for its use of object-oriented programming (OOP) and especially for its use of the EAV model.[citation needed] This allows Magento to be much more versatile than most e-commerce platforms at storing a large range of data.

These features give the system versatility and adaptability, allowing multiple websites and themes to be run on the same set of layout commands, same set of blocks and even the same database. However, the drawback of these systems is that they result in slow load times, for which Magento compensates with additional caching and database indexing.