Yireo - Extensions, tutorials and blog for Magento and Joomla!

Magento developers needed

At the moment, Magento is experiencing a strange luxury: The demand for Magento shops is much greater than the supply can handle. This sounds great for Magento developers wanting to make money. It sounds less great for customers looking for a professional developer. What's the problem?

Magento is booming business

Magento is booming business. The e-commerce package is flexible enough to be suited in many different situations. It allows for scalability when a shop grows. And there is already a large number of extensions available, making it easier to setup a Magento shop without custom coding. Because of these features, the demand for Magento shops is growing rapidly. The strategy that the creators of Magento set out was to overtake the market of existing open source shopping carts, and it seems they are doing so pretty well.

But another focus of Magento is the enterprise market, and the enterprise market requires more than a click-click application: It requires a solid coding platform - flexibility seems more important than usability (because usability is less important if you have more fundings). It requires clustering abilities and extensibility - Magento has all that. You could say that the ease of use of Magento was there to take-over the open source market, but the more complex features are there to take-over the enterprise market.

Much flexibility, too complex

But this flexibility comes at a cost: It makes Magento more complex than other applications - some even say that Magento is "over-engineered". And a complex tool requires an expert to set it up. Installing Magento is fairly easy, but things like configuring payment methods, modifying XML layouts, connecting to external applications, require experience. That's where the blog-title comes from: Magento developers needed.

While the demand for Magento is growing, the supply is lacking. There are too few experience PHP-developers that can deal with the Magento application. There are too few Magento configuration-experts to setup Magento websites without them falling apart at the next configuration change. Yes, there are enough SEO-experts and marketing engineers. But the exact point where specific knowledge of the application (Magento) is needed, that's where the supply is failing.

Say hello to the gold seekers

If there is a short supply, the charge goes up - simple economics. So if there are a lot of people asking for Magento, there is a lot of money to be made with it. This attracks a special crowd called the gold seekers - and the current age of Magento could be called the Magento Gold Rush. Gold seekers do not care about the beauty of Magento, they only care about making money with it.

But this way of making money could conflict with the steep learning curve that Magento has. The easiest solution to this, is to skip the official Magento way and just apply hacks: Magento core files are overwritten, ugly PHP-code that my neighbour-kid could write is inserted directly into PHTML-templates, and a shit-load of extensions are installed without actually knowing what the consequences are.

And that's the danger

And there in lies the danger: Magento has become very popular very quickly, and the supply still needs to catch up. But because Magento is complex, some of the developers we have come in contact to have become sloppy. This leads to insecure and less-performance webshops - leading to unsatisfied customers. And a lot of unsatisfied customers could lead to Magento becoming very unpopular. In a twisted way, the great architecture of Magento might become its downfall (sounds Roman doesn't it?).

Perhaps if Magento would gear down, it would allow for developers for breathing again? Or should it keep up the pace of creating great stuff? To be or not to be?