MagentoFor anyone who doesn’t know, Magento is a new open-source e-commerce platform first stable released Q3 2008 using the PHP5 Zend Framework. What is amazing about this platform is in less than one year it has rocketed to the top of Google search volume trends closely rivaling—and soon to overtake—the long-time osCommerce project. Today the project is supported by Varien, an Open Source eCommerce software development and consulting firm who started the project, and an ever-growing community of over 68,000 users and developers.

To give you a brief overview of the timeline so far: In July, Magento was awarded “Best New Open Source Project” by the 2008 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards. In August, Magento was awarded “Best of Open Source Enterprise Applications” by the 2008 InfoWorld.com BOSSIE Awards. This year Forrester Research, the leading technology and market research firm, named Magento as an “Emerging Player To Watch” in its Forrester Wave™: B2C eCommerce Platforms Report, Q1 2009. The growth has just been incredible! Check out the blog for a full in-depth history.

Personally, I have been using this platform for a little over 4 months now (running version 1.2.1 as of this writing) and can’t say enough good things about it. The feature-set is truly an amazing combination of technology. If I had one complaint, I wish there were more documentation, and more extensions, but it’s still pretty early for all that and I know the community is actively working on this with the wiki, screencasts, phpdocs, etc. If there is ever anything you can’t find there, I have always found supportive folks in the #magento chatroom on irc.freenode.net.

Check out their store demo and in the meantime stay tuned for updates, Q&A, tips, tricks, and hacks as I continue benefiting from and contributing back to the platform.