Magento is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

e-commerce platform written in

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...

. It uses multiple other PHP frameworks such as

Laminas Laminas Project (formerly Zend Framework or ZF) is an open source, object-oriented web application framework implemented in PHP 7 and licensed under the New BSD License. The framework is basically a collection of professional PHP-based packag ...

(formerly known as

Zend Framework Laminas Project (formerly Zend Framework or ZF) is an open source, object-oriented web application framework implemented in PHP 7 and licensed under the New BSD License. The framework is basically a collection of professional PHP-based packa ...

) and

Symfony Symfony is a free and open-source PHP web application framework and a set of reusable PHP component libraries. It was published as free software on October 18, 2005, and released under the MIT license. Goal Symfony aims to speed up the creati ...

. Magento

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

is distributed under Open Software License (OSL) v3.0. Magento was acquired by

Adobe Inc Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...

in May 2018 for $1.68 billion. The software was originally developed by Varien Inc., a US

private company A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in the respective listed markets, but rather the company's stock is ...

headquarter Headquarters (commonly referred to as HQ) denotes the location where most, if not all, of the important functions of an organization are coordinated. In the United States, the corporate headquarters represents the entity at the center or the top ...

ed in

Culver City, California Culver City is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 40,779. Founded in 1917 as a "whites only" sundown town, it is now an ethnically diverse city with what was called the "third-most d ...

, with assistance from

volunteer Volunteering is a voluntary act of an individual or group freely giving time and labor for community service. Many volunteers are specifically trained in the areas they work, such as medicine, education, or emergency rescue. Others serve ...

s and open source software contributors. More than 150,000 online stores have been created on the platform. The platform code has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times, and $155 billion worth of goods were sold through Magento-based systems in 2019. As of April 2021, Magento holds a 2.32% market share in global e-commerce platforms. Varien published the first general-availability release of the software on March 31, 2008. Roy Rubin, the former CEO of Varien, later sold a share of the company to

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a ...

, which eventually completely acquired and then sold the company to

Permira Permira is a global investment firm. Founded in 1985, the firm advises funds with assets under management of €60+ billion. The Permira funds have made approximately 300 private equity investments in four key sectors: Technology, Consumer, Ser ...

; Permira later sold it to

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...

. On November 17, 2015, Magento 2.0 was released. Among the features changed in V2 were: * significant performance and security improvements, especially when paired with PHP version 7+ * integrated server-side Apache Varnish caching with minimal tuning * reduced database table locking issues * enterprise-grade database scalability * rich snippets for structured data * new file structure with easier customization *

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

pre-processing using

LESS Less or LESS may refer to: fewer than,: not as much. Computing * less (Unix), a Unix utility program * Less (stylesheet language), a dynamic stylesheet language * Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), a product development framework that extends Scrum Other ...

& CSS URL resolver * modular code base structure, offering fine-grain customization * improved coding patterns * built-in client-side JavaScript minimization and optimization * improved static content browser caching Magento employs the

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

MariaDB MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the ori ...

relational database management system, the

programming language, and elements of the

. It applies the conventions of

object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of pr ...

and

model–view–controller Model–view–controller (MVC) is a software architectural pattern commonly used for developing user interfaces that divide the related program logic into three interconnected elements. This is done to separate internal representations of infor ...

architecture. Magento also uses the

entity–attribute–value model Entity–attribute–value model (EAV) is a data model to encode, in a space-efficient manner, entities where the number of attributes (properties, parameters) that can be used to describe them is potentially vast, but the number that will actuall ...

to store data and as of version 2.4 it requires

Elasticsearch Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is developed in Java and is dual-l ...

for its catalog search capability. On top of that, Magento 2 introduced the Model-View-ViewModel pattern to its front-end code using the

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

library

Knockout.js Knockout is a standalone JavaScript implementation of the Model–View–ViewModel Model–view–viewmodel (MVVM) is an architectural pattern in computer software that facilitates the separation of the development of the graphical user int ...

History

Magento officially started development in early 2007. Seven months later, on August 31, 2007, the first public beta version was released. Varien, the company owning Magento, formerly worked with

osCommerce OsCommerce (styled "osCommerce" - "open source Commerce") is an e-commerce software solution. It can be used on any web server that has PHP and MySQL installed. It is available as free software under the GNU General Public License. History OsCom ...

. Varien had originally planned to

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods ei ...

osCommerce but later decided to rewrite it as Magento. In the first years of its existence, the platform has been the winner of the "''Best of Open Source Software Awards"'' and ''"SourceForge Community Choice Awards"'' several times. In February 2011,

announced it had made an investment in Magento in 2010, worth a 49% ownership share of the company. On June 6, 2011, eBay announced that it would be acquiring the rest of Magento, which would join its new X.Commerce initiative. Magento's CEO and co-founder Roy Rubin wrote on the Magento blog that "Magento will continue to operate out of Los Angeles, with Yoav Kutner and me as its leaders.". Yoav Kutner left Magento in April 2012, citing that the vision for Magento had changed since the time of acquisition due to high-level staff changes. As a result of the breakup of eBay following

Carl Icahn Carl Celian Icahn (; born February 16, 1936) is an American financier. He is the founder and controlling shareholder of Icahn Enterprises, a public company and diversified conglomerate holding company based in Sunny Isles Beach. Icahn takes l ...

raid Raid, RAID or Raids may refer to: Attack * Raid (military), a sudden attack behind the enemy's lines without the intention of holding ground * Corporate raid, a type of hostile takeover in business * Panty raid, a prankish raid by male college ...

, Magento was spun out as an independent company by the new owner

private equity In the field of finance, the term private equity (PE) refers to investment funds, usually limited partnerships (LP), which buy and restructure financially weak companies that produce goods and provide services. A private-equity fund is both a ty ...

fund on 3 November 2015. In May 2018 it was announced that Magento would be acquired by

for $1.68bn with a view to integrating it into Adobe Experience Cloud, its Enterprise CMS platform. The acquisition was finalized on June 19, 2018.

Overview

Magento provides two distinct platforms: Magento Open Source (previously Magento Community Edition) and Magento Commerce; the latter is available in an on-premises version (previously Magento Enterprise Edition) or as a platform-as-a-service (previously Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition). There were also two former platforms, Magento Professional Edition, and Magento Go.

Magento Open Source

Magento Open Source, previously Magento Community Edition, is an open-source

eCommerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain managemen ...

platform. Developers can implement the core files and extend its functionality by adding new plug-in modules provided by other developers. Since the first public beta version was released in 2007, Magento Open Source has been developed and customized in order to provide a basic eCommerce platform. The current release and each of the previous historical release versions of the 1.X and 2.X version branches of Magento Open Source are available on the Magento Commerce, Inc. website for download as single-file downloads. Development of the 2.X version branch of Magento Open Source is coordinated publicly on GitHub. Magento 1.9.4, the last version of Magento 1.X to be released, reached end-of-life on June 30, 2020. The latest actively supported versions of Magento Open Source are 2.3.7-p1, 2.4.2-p2, 2.4.3 and 2.4.4 Magento will remain Open source after the recent acquisition by

OpenMage Initiative

of the last ever release of Magento 1.x (version 1.9.4.5) was made available on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

under an initiative name
OpenMage
which is short for Opensource Magento. Shortly afterwards a new unofficial community driven project was created to offer

long term support Long-term support (LTS) is a product lifecycle management policy in which a stable release of computer software is maintained for a longer period of time than the standard edition. The term is typically reserved for open-source software, where i ...

and patches to Magento 1.x users.

Magento 2

Magento 2 has many new and improved features, developer tools, and its architecture is quite different from all the previous versions. Magento 2 was announced in 2010. It was planned for release in 2011, and its merchant beta version was released in July 2015. Since then Magento 1 and Magento 2 have existed simultaneously. Magento caters to three levels of businesses; small business, mid-market, and enterprise.

Magento Commerce / Adobe Commerce

Released April 11, 2016, Magento Commerce is an e-Commerce

platform as a service Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computin ...

. As part of a long-term project to integrate the acquired Magento sales, marketing, and product teams within the Adobe Experience Cloud business unit, in April 2021 Magento Commerce was rebranded to Adobe Commerce.

Magento Commerce (On-Premises)

Magento Commerce (On-Premises), previously "Magento Enterprise Edition" is derived from Magento Open Source and has the same core files. Unlike Open Source, this is not free but has more features and functionality. This product is designed for large businesses that require technical support with installation, usage, configuration, and troubleshooting. Although Magento Commerce has annual maintenance fees, neither Open Source nor Commerce (On-Premises) include hosting. The Magento team develops Magento Commerce by cooperating with users and third parties. Development on the 2.X branch of Magento Commerce is coordinated publicly on GitHub. The latest actively supported versions of Magento Commerce is 2.3.4 (EE and CE) released on October 8, 2019.

Magento Partners

Solution Partners

Magento Solution Partners are development agencies who specialize in eCommerce delivery for Magento Commerce merchants and have extensive experience implementing, maintaining and upgrading Magento eCommerce websites. Many Magento solution partners develop their own extensions, solutions and customization into the Magento Commerce platform.

Technology Partners

Magento Technology Partners are companies or products that help merchants improve their website out of the box. They cover more than 20 different categories including marketing automation, payments, content management, shipping, tax, hosting, and performance. To ensure quality and compatibility, all Magento Technology Partners pass a rigorous business and technology review. Magento Technology Partners can be found in the official website directory.

Security concerns

In 2015 it was reported that outdated or unpatched Magento web stores were susceptible to a

cross-site scripting Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of security vulnerability that can be found in some web applications. XSS attacks enable attackers to inject client-side scripts into web pages viewed by other users. A cross-site scripting vulnerability may ...

attack, which allowed attackers to perform online skimming to steal user credit card information. According to a security expert, more than 4000 Magento web stores were vulnerable to such an attack in October 2016. In 2017 security company DefenseCode reported that Magento CE web stores were susceptible to a remote code execution attack, which allowed attackers to perform

web skimming Web skimming, formjacking or a magecart attack is an attack where the attacker injects malicious code into a website and extracts data from an HTML form that the user has filled in. That data is then submitted to a server under control of the att ...

, steal stored credit card information of future and previous customers, take control of the database, and in some instances even the complete server - including other Magento instances. It's suspected that up to 260,000 Magento web stores could be vulnerable to such an attack in April 2017. In 2019, Magento reported a potential vulnerability in its administration URL location for its 2.1.x, 2.2.x, and 2.3.x versions. It also reported a critical security breach for customers running version 1.0.2 (and earlier versions) of the Magestore Store Locator extension. Similar incidences of a Magecart attack and Magento killer have also been faced by e-commerce store owners.

Events

"Imagine eCommerce" is the annual Magento eCommerce conference that has run since 2011. The first event was held in February 2011 in Los Angeles with more than 600 Magento merchants, partners, and developers. The goals of the event is sharing ecommerce ideas and providing networking opportunity sessions. Besides Imagine, Magento also organizes local "Magento Live" events in which the participants will have opportunities to learn more about ecommerce in general, get introduced to local Magento partners and learn about upcoming changes to the Magento software itself. Magento Live events have been held in Australia (Sydney), UK (London), The Netherlands (Amsterdam), Spain (Barcelona), France (Paris) and Germany (München). There is a non-profit organization that was established in 2019 and that contributes up to more than 24 global "Meet Magento" events per year named "Magento Association" The association is open to all companies who are active in ecommerce in any way and want using Magento commerce now or in future. The project has been run on all developed market of Magento like Germany,

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

, France,

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...

, Denmark, Italy,

Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , i ...

, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia,

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

and also Vietnam.

Certification

There are four different Magento certifications. Three of them aim to prove developers' competency in implementing modules; one (Certified Solution Specialist) targets business users (consultants, analysts, project managers). Magento Front End Developer Certification is mainly focused on improving the user interface (UI) of back end developers who implement the core modules. The Plus certification tests deep understanding of Magento Enterprise modules and the entire architecture.

Resources

Magento DevBox is a Docker container that allows for the easy installation of the latest Magento 2 CE or EE platform in a virtual environment. It also allows developers to link to an existing local Magento 2 installation. As of June 2017, it is still in beta. Magento Commerce 2.3.4 released on January 28, 2020, the latest version is v2.3.4, download it from tech resources page or GitHub. Magento 1 migration to Magento 2 can be done by the official Data Migration Tool. The migration can be performed by developers with extensive Magento 1 and 2 experience. Magento also has a diverse group of eCommerce articles written to help B2B and B2C companies. These can be found in the blog section of the website. eCommerce case studies are also another portion of the Magento website that provides inside information on how Magento impacts brands.

Criticism and controversy

A TechCrunch article reports that according to its sources, former Magento employees claim they have been collectively "cheated out" of nearly 7-10% of Magento, a stake that would have been worth approximately $18 million when eBay acquired the company.

References

{{Authority control EBay Free e-commerce software Companies based in Culver City, California Software companies based in California Free software programmed in PHP Software using the Academic Free License Free content management systems Software using the Open Software License Software companies of the United States 2010 mergers and acquisitions