Magento’s new e-commerce platform offers WordPress-like simplicity

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I just returned from an amazing time at Magento Imagine, the first-ever user conference hosted by Magento, a California-based company behind a rapidly emerging open source e-commerce platform.

In a previous article, I asked if Magento could have a place in local government workflows involving citizen payment processing. While that question remains to be explored, the Imagine conference piqued my interest with the announcement of their newest platform, “Magento Go.” This exciting environment appears to offer an admin interface that has the user-centric signs of a WordPress interface, a favorite blogging platform of millions (with CMS capabilities) and a big player in the open-source community.

Magento Go is a hosted solution that provides a simple method for small business owners to get online stores up and running in no time. I equate the admin area (saw a sneak peek in a brief demo) to WordPress due to the ease of use – drag and drop elements, wysiwyg editors and simple design customization.

Like WordPress, Magento Go will offer a browseable template gallery driven by community-contributed designs for free and purchase. As with WordPress, front-end designers will also be able to customize their designs further with CSS and HTML.

The Magento Go platform will feature an array of apps built by developers to extend the out-of-the-box functionality. I’m looking forward to learning more about this platform when Magento launches the new environment sometime this month!