Magento

Roy Rubin, Founder and CEO of Varien, will be attending and speaking at two programs next week in Australia as part of the CeBIT Australia 2008 Conference Program.

On May 20th Roy will be speaking at Open CeBIT, Australia’s premier business-focused Open Source conference. Roy’s topic at Open CeBIT is ”Filling in the Open Source Shopping Cart Vacuum”.

On May 22nd Roy will be speaking at Transaction 2.0, a one-day conference for businesses seeking a competitive advantage from their online platform. His talk at Transaction 2.0 is titled ”Creating a Self-Funded, Commercial Open Source Business Case Study”.

If you’d like to schedule a meeting outside of the conferences to discuss business opportunities, please contact Roy directly.

Why do I love Magento?  From a design standpoint… you can literally skin this baby anyway you wish. The Design is TRUELY separate from the code. So CSS fanatics dig in ... The team behind Magento has put a lot of time into developing a smart, savvy system that can deliver results amongst a variety of e-commerce stores. Multiple language support, Multiple stores, Smart browsing via layered navigation, RSS product feeds, tagging and reviewing products, comparing products, product wishlists…. even Product Image Zoom is standard right out of the box. Impressive?  Trust me theres more once you pop the hood.

Recent post from NickL’s blog - ibuildstuff. Nick recently launched kanemarie.com on Magento.

The Open Source awards season is in full swing. Help us get Magento nominated for the SourceForge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards.

Help us spread the word and get Magento nominated for the 2008 Open Source Awards (to be presented in OSCON). From the O’reilly Radar blog:

For the 4th year running, Google and O’Reilly will present a set of Open Source Awards at OSCON 2008. The awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Past recipients for 2005-2007 include Doc Searls, Jeff Waugh, Gerv Markham, Julian Seward, David Heinemeier Hansson, Karl Fogel, David Recordon, and Paul Vixie.

The nomination process is open to the entire open source community, closing May 15th, 2008. Send your nominations to osawards AT oreilly DOT com. Nominations should include the name of the recipient, any associated project/org, suggested title for the award ("Best Hacker”, “Best Community Builder”, etc.), and a description of why you are nominating the individual. Google and O’Reilly employees cannot be nominated.

We are happy to announce that Magento PHPDocs are now available.

Magento PHPDocs can be found here: http://docs.magentocommerce.com/

Varien Lib PHPDocs are also available and can be found here: http://docs.magentocommerce.com/Varien/index.html

We hope you find it useful.

We are pleased to announce the availability for download of Magento Version 1.0.19870. This version includes enhancements and bug fixes, which are detailed in the release notes. Upgrading to this version from 1.0.19700 will resolve the issue that this patch was issued for as well.

*Please Note: Instructions for Upgrading Magento with a full package, via SVN, via the MagentoConnect Manager and using SSH shell access are available in this wiki post.

Please read the wiki before upgrading.

If you are using the Magento Connect (PEAR Packages) we also recommend upgrading the Magento Connect Manager here

Magento is easily the best framework for developing e-commerce frontends. It is extremely well designed and extensible, providing us with a great foundation for delivering value-added functions that distinguish our clients' stores from the competition.”

Alexander Ringsdorff, Visions New Media

Tell us a bit about Visions New Media and Alpedia.de?

Visions is an e-commerce consultancy, based in Hannover, Germany. We specialize in highly customized e-commerce solutions and deploy them on our high availability cluster. Alpedia, a start-up shop for office supplies, is our first Magento project. Alpedia went live on April 1st, 2008, with more than 18,000 products from day one.

What technologies are currently implemented / integrated in the frontend and behind-the-scenes?

Especially because we started developing on early preview versions of Magento, a big part of the challenge was getting Magento fast and scalable right from the start. For this reason, we spent a lot of time optimizing and debugging the core. One of the many exciting features we're working on right now is an extremely fast, new search function. We're currently in testing for this, and will deploy it in the next couple of days or so.

On the backend side, we have implemented complete ERP integration with Magento; this includes exporting orders that we received from the frontend, and feeding updates in the order status back to Magento. Moreover, we have devised our own product import system that can scale all the way up to hundreds of thousands of products and their attributes.

Why did you choose Magento for the project?

Magento is easily the best framework for developing e-commerce frontends. It is extremely well designed and extensible, providing us with a great foundation for delivering value-added functions that distinguish our clients' stores from the competition. And, of course, it is open-source - thanks this combination, there are really no limits to what we can achieve for our clients on the basis of Magento.

What other solutions did you consider and/or evaluate?

We evaluated other e-commerce solutions - closed and open - some time ago, and were extremely dissatisfied with what was offered by the market. For this reason, the choice was really only between developing Alpedia in-house completely, or using Magento.

What are your future plans with Magento?

We're really excited about the community and ecosystem that is rapidly forming around Magento. Part of our commitment as Platinum partners is contributing back to the community, which we will do by contributing bugfixes and enhancements to the core.

We will develop these improvements not only for our own e-commerce clients, but also make them available to other Magento agencies. This will allow them to concentrate on design and user-experience aspects, while leveraging all the infrastructure, development and integration work that we put into Magento.

Any recommendations for people evaluating Magento?

You will probably not see the forest for the trees in the first couple of days of trying out Magento. The important thing to realize is that - while the software is certainly complex - that its engineering is more than impressive; this is the platform to build upon for the future.

Any final words of wisdom?

Thanks to Varien and the community for the great work that has gone into Magento already! If you're just starting out, always remember: Magento may seem intimidating at first, but all the community, which we're proud to be part of, will be there to help you!

Today we are introducing a new feature in the Magento Community site that visually maps our users. Maps are provided per forum thread (sample), blog post (sample), and a master map of all current users browsing the site.

Magento Community members span the entire globe. We hope this feature brings everyone just a bit closer

The Magento User Guide is here to help you through the process of setting up your store. The User Guide begins with an introduction to installing and configuring the basic settings for your store, and then walks through the steps to configure more advanced settings, setting up your payment modules, creating and editing categories and products and much more.

If you have a specific question on an element within Magento you can skip to the chapter within the User Guide using the table of contents. If you are just getting started it is best to go through the User Guide chapter by chapter to walk you through the process of configuring your store.

This User Guide is a Wiki, and as such, you should feel free to edit and add elements as you see fit.

In the next few weeks, the Magento User Guide will be available as a book in print and ebook formats.

We are happy to announce that a new version of the osCommerce Migration Tool is now available through MagentoConnect.

The new version includes:

- Support for customer accounts with multiple addresses
- Conversion of different encodings to default utf8
- Support for products’ special prices
- Support for products’ images
- Conversion for timezones
- Fixes for known issues of previous release

We hope you find this useful.

Employing the latest technologies and working with all major banks and credit card issuers, Flo2Cash offers the greatest variety of payment channels within New Zealand, with an unparalleled degree of functionality and customisation – so business growth is stimulated by healthier cash flow, as well as enhanced customer services and retention. We also provide your customers with the means to make payments through a variety of convenient channels, so that bills are easily managed and shopping can be done with the full confidence of financial security.

Get the Extension Key at Magento Connect

It’s by far one of the more exciting e-commerce platforms available for free on the market today. Dripping with features, they really have thought of everything. Wishlists, shop by price and category, item comparison - all the things we’ve come to expect from professional web stores. Its software as good as this that really keeps licensed software on their toes..

Not Your Average Geeks blog review of ”9 kick ass Open Source E-commerce platforms”.

(also mentioned on CNET - Thanks Matt!)