Open Source web applications can respond quickly to changes in web trends and technologies, allowing the software to be widely tested and regularly updated – and all for FREE!
For those not familiar with the term open source, it describes practices in production and development that provide open access to the end product’s source materials. (Video: Stephen Fry introducing open source software)
In choosing the right technologies for your website you may have already come across some of the leading open source content management systems (CMS) such as Drupal, WordPress and Joomla. The continuing growth and success of these products is greatly attributed to the open nature of the projects, where any developer can contribute to fixing problems and build enhancements. So as well as the software being free to use, regular updates are also made available by the global community of developers to improve security and usability – allowing these products to respond quickly to changes in security and trends.
Despite these advantages of open source products, can we really trust them with our online sales? Magento is proving we can.
Magento is an enterprise level e-commerce and CMS application which has been designed with big businesses in mind – the likes of Nokia, Xerox, Adidas and Samsung have all adopted Magento at a commercial level. However despite this commercial arm, Magento has actually been built on open source technologies and is available for free, making a very powerful system affordable to SME’s.
Unlike other older e-commerce platforms Magento has been built from the ground up on modern technologies meaning it not only offers improved customer and administrative usability but it does so with more focus on SEO. The result of which is that the software is proactively helping to organise products and content in a way that search engines can lock into, helping to organically drive new visitors to your shop.
We’ve had fun developing a few sites in the latter part of 2010 on Magento and are very excited by the results. Why not check them out:
