After the great response to our post “10 Things We Love About Magento” we thought we’d follow up with a post about the features and functionality we’d like to see added to Magento in 2009. We’re sure many of these things are already on the teams to-do list but it can’t hurt to give them a little nudge!

So, in no particular order, here we go…

WYSIWYG Editor as Standard

Yes, we too hate WYSIWYG editors. You spend all that time crafting a beatifuly coded site, hand it over to the wrong client and in 5 minutes they can make a real mess of things. However, in the real world, any kind of CMS (ecommerce or not) needs a WYSIWYG editor as standard. There is documentation on implementing FCKeditor in Magento, however we really need this included out of the box (since every time we upgrade we have to re-install the damn thing!). And could we have TinyMCE editor or something better please, FCKeditor really sucks!

Invoice Customisation on the Back End

I was shocked at how difficult it is to edit the PDF invoice and packing slips in Magento. I think I’d much rather have a web page than a PDF I have little, if no control over. We need to be able to control the layout completely, and add our own branding if necessary. This is one area in particular that is, and will continue to be a real pain in the neck when working on real world projects.

Better Product Import

Magento’s product import could do with a little work.  We really need to be able to import custom options and multiple images. Having to go back and put that stuff in can be very time consuming if you have a large product range (in fact we had to write a script to do this for a recent project). It kind of defeats the purpose of product import if you can’t actually import all of the data you want to associate with that product.

Ability to Delete Orders

Our Magento projects can get rather complex and we tend to put through a large number of test orders. This means that the client usually ends up with 20-30 orders on their system before their site even goes live. Do they want these orders on their system? Of course not! Can we delete them? Hell no. Surely a delete button for Administrators can’t be too much effort to add?

[UPDATE 18/02/09: I recently stumbled across a very useful Magento Extension that allows you to do just this. Big thanks to Boutik Circus for this]

Performance Enhancements

A short glance at the Magento forums will find thread after thread with complaints about Magento’s performance. The fact is, Magento is an enterprise level product and does require a high quality, specially configured server setup. However even on a specially configured server, with a large busy site, things can get a little sluggish at times. We’d love to see the Magento team spend some time making performance enhancements especially in the admin area, which seems to run a lot slower than the front-end.

Don’t get us wrong, we love Magento, and understand that with a product still in its infancy its difficult for the developers to tackle everything at once. We’re sure that the Magento team have their own priorities, however these are the things at the top of our list and if anyone from Varien is listening…we’d love you forever for implementing them in the very near future!