I’ve been working with Magento for a while now and really enjoy developing modules for it. Lately I’ve been wondering if it’s possible/feasible to strip out the ecommerce aspect and use the core components as an application framework, similar to ZF or CakePHP.
For example, inside /app/code/core/, everything except the following would be removed:
- Mage/Adminhtml
- Mage/Admin
- Mage/Core
- (I might be missing a couple other important pieces)
- All Varien and Zend code would also remain intact.
You would be able to develop custom web applications while taking advantage of support for:
- Modules
- Blocks, layouts, and templates
- Backend with users, permissions, and configuration
- Mage static methods to getModel, etc
- Translations
- Web services
Is this feasible or even a good idea?
Colin Mollenhour has something along these lines already:
https://github.com/colinmollenhour/magento-lite
Thanks to Vinai Kopp for telling me about this during the XDevCamp at the 2011 Magento Innovate Conference! 🙂