I said Magento was week at backend, that might be wrong. Of course compared with any accounting or ERP software, Magento is lack of some facilities to control the work flow of order fulfilment. When I dive into Magento backend, I think it should be sufficient for most of business. Most of business do not need an extension to fulfil orders, only need to customise the templates involved.
Supprisingly, the templates are separated. I mean, Magento does not offer an overall template to generate different but related documents. For example, I must go through all the areas in the following table to change what to show up as order items detail.
| Frontend | Backend | |||||
| Screen | Screen | |||||
| Order | thead | |||||
| tbody | ||||||
| tfoot | ||||||
| totals | ||||||
| Invoice | thead | |||||
| tbody | ||||||
| tfoot | ||||||
| totals | ||||||
| Credit Memo | thead | |||||
| tbody | ||||||
| tfoot | ||||||
| totals | ||||||
| Shipment | thead | |||||
| tbody | ||||||
| tfoot | ||||||
| totals | ||||||
Separating those templates make the programming less hassle, and the template changer can understand them easily. However, if I am that template changer, I hate copy & paste. As a programmer, I do my best to avoid delivering a program which require people to copy & paste.
More importantly, if a template changer forgets to go through the above checklist to make a simple change in the order items detail, admin and customer get different view of the same order on screen, in email, or print-out when ordered, invoiced, credited, or shipped. I do not think this approach is acceptable. It is on my agenda to write an extension to make these documents under control.