In creating e-commerce solutions for our clients and ourselves, we choose the platform or underlying technology based on the needs of the project, the types of products or services offered, and how the client will manage their e-tailing operations.

For our more complex projects, we have yet to find a platform that has more versatility and depth of features than Magento. It’s not ideal for every project we build, but for those with complex, multiple store configurations, Magento allows us to do things from an engineering, marketing, and operations standpoint little matched by other systems.The biggest challenge with Magento has long been the lack of documentation. Even today, even the on-screen help, when logged into Magento’s Administrative backend, is incomplete.

That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of information about Magento. There are thousands of forum postings, hundreds of haphazardly arranged Wiki articles, and numerous blogs by Magento fans.

This means, of course, that if you want to find out how to do something in Magento, it often requires many, many Google searches, testing offered solutions (which many times fail due to posting errors or out-of-date versions), and hours of wasted energy.

We experienced this first-hand as we worked to understand, design, and implement a complex multiple-store strategy to support our growing family of BCUZ Stores. Like so many other Magento developers, we waded through hundreds of forum postings and blogs.We bought several hardcover books, each purporting to teach the reader how to use Magento. None approached the concept of how to build and manage a multiple-store Magento installation.“Where there’s a void.”After investing hours and hours of time and effort into really learning how Magento can be used to manage multiple stores and businesses with the same installation, it seemed very logical to take all we had learned and put it into a book others might find beneficial.

So, I did just that. He wrote his first book, "Managing Multiple Stores in Magento," a self-published booklet that went on to sell thousands of copies.