Learn about Magento, a popular eCommerce platform.
Magento as an eCommerce platform
Magento is a web content management system that grants users significant control over their website's settings, plug-ins, appearance, and functionality. Based on open-source technology, developer skills are not necessary if users are willing to purchase the appropriate plug-ins
Magento includes the following features, among others:
- SEO management
- Customizable shopping cart system
- Flexible coupons and pricing rules
- Analytics and reporting
- Catalogue browsing and management
- iPhone optimization
- Customer order tracking
- Product browsing with multiple images per product and zoom functionality
- Multilingual and foreign currency support
Read Magento Explained: Understanding the Magento ecosystem.
Adobe acquisition
In May 2018, Adobe announced their acquisition of Magento and their intent to integrate it into their Adobe Experience Cloud.
Optimizations and add-ons
Many applications exist that can expand the functionality of Magento. For more additional information regarding these and other add-ons, visit the Nexcess website.
memcached
memcached is a memory-based caching system that uses a simple key and value system to store data in a table in memory. This accelerates the rate of data access. However, a cache flush is an all-or-nothing operation and can be substandard if the bulk of the cache is not dirty. memcached uses a threaded model, allowing it to process requests in parallel efficiently.
Redis
Similar to memcached, Redis is a memory-based caching system that uses a simple key/value system to store data in a table in memory. Redis adds the advantage of tags to the storage model. This allows an application using Redis to target any dirty sections of the cache during flush operations. Its current implementation is single-threaded, meaning it can only process requests serially for each instance of Redis.
Varnish
Varnish is a web application accelerator, otherwise known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. When correctly configured, Varnish can be used to accelerate web applications with minimal performance degradation. Varnish stores the assembled web pages or parts of web pages in memory and relieves the application itself from having to perform any work when a cache hit occurs.
Turpentine
The Nexcess Turpentine Magento extension makes use of Varnish to greatly enhance the performance of Magento Enterprise. By default, Varnish functions poorly with Magento because the latter does not cache requests with cookies. Instead, Magento sends a frontend cookie with every request causing a near-zero hit-rate for the Varnish cache. Turpentine configures Varnish to work with Magento, enhancing cache hit rate of Magento
Themes
Magento provides a skeletal theme for eCommerce websites. Users can then alter this theme without endangering their site's content and layout.
Versions of Magento
For details about current available versions of Magento, see the official website.
For help hosting Magento, visit the Nexcess website, or contact the sales team, available from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. eastern time ET, Monday - Friday.
