The hype surrounding Magento Commerce’s official release has lingered for about a year. For those of you who haven’t been privy to the news – Magento Commerce is an open source eCommerce shopping cart platform brought to you by a company called Verian. The shopping cart is quite feature rich out of the box, and is positioned to be the de-facto standard for open source eCommerce platforms. As it stands, this product is expected to oust Open Source frontrunner OSCommerce along with a handful of other open source, PHP based solutions. I won’t get into much detail about what Magento Commerce is and its history, there’s plenty of coverage the company has had over the past year in anticipation for it’s release – which by the way, was March 31st.

What I do want to discuss in this post is my first take at Magento Commerce. Now, I’ll preface this by stating that I’ve only gone so far as installing the software (well, actually the Magento Commerce host Crucial installed it all for me), playing around with it, setting up some products, and toying with its features. My goal is to setup a fully functional production eCommerce site in the near future. But, before we go jumping onto the Magento Commerce craze, let’s tackle a few things we like about it, and a few things we don’t. I’m sure there will be more added to both sides of the table (hopefully in favor of the software) as we get more involved with the application, but for now, here’s our first takes.