Magento

Due to popular (almost overwhelming) demand, the Magento team is now offering professional installation services. This is ideal for those Magento fans that wish to try out the product (on their desired, supported hosting environment) without the hassle of installation.

You can learn more about the service at http://www.magentocommerce.com/pro-install/ .

We are happy to announce the availability for download of Magento Preview version 0.7.15480. The major highlights of the release include sales order management (invoices, shipments, offline refunds), reorders, advanced search, support for Paypal Website Standard (see video) and design themes management per store, product or category (see related blog post).

Major Highlights

• Added Sales Order Management (invoices, shipments, offline refunds)
• Added Reorders functionality
• Added Design Themes Management functionality: per store, per product & per category
• Added Paypal Website Standard IPN method
• Added Product Tier Prices by Customer Group
• Added Product Special Price by dates
• Added Advanced Search functionality
• Attribute editing - added show in advanced search option per attribute
• Order Management: Invoices, Credit Memos, Shipments
• Added Scheduled Tasks Management (cron working)
• Added system configuration option to make a payment method available in specified countries only

Improvements and Bugfixes

• Added tax configration options: apply after discount, apply on shipping, tax rate type for shipping
• Added “Save and Continue” button on CMS page & block edit page
• Fixed Mage_Log statistics aggregation
• Added “Continue Shopping” button
• Fixed admin permissions editing
• Fixed store switcher
• Fixed product images uploading
• Fixed system configuration saving
• Fixed ORIG_SCRIPT_NAME problem by using Zend_Controller_Request_Http::getBasePath
• Added SET MODE=’’ when opening mysql connection
• Always load layout/local.xml after all other layout update files
• Cleaned HTML for validation purposes, CSS cleanup
• In all config.xml replaced */controller to adminhtml/controller, to enable custom admin controllers
• Fixed generation of module route front name in urls
• Fixed config xml cache generation, xml entities
• Fixed installation exceptions handling
• Catalog pager “Per page” value is configurable now
• Inventory “Use Config Settings” checkboxes are checked be default when creating a new product now
• Added UTF-8 to response headers
• Moved head out of root templates, added configurable body class (body class contains dashes only), added body class for module-controller-action, cms-pages, categorypath-cat1-cat2, category-cat2, product-prod
• Added currency conversion rates caching
• Moved design configuration from themes to admin config
• Enabled switching from global to local attribute
• Minor .htaccess updates, added line for 1and1 hosting
• Fixed install wizard - continue after download page in IE
• Fixed table rate shipping
• Template Path Hints

Known Issues

• Direct refunds for online payment gateways will be implemented in the next release.
• Adding tracking information from invoice along with created shipment is coming
• After upgrade, need to logout and login to admin to see the changes
• Paypal Express Checkout for Paypal Payments Pro can’t auto capture from the admin manage orders module

Sample Data

The sample data archive file is available in .zip (41 MB), .tar.gz (40 MB), and .tar.bz2 (37MB) formats to download (the files contain exactly the same content inside and are provided in different formats just for your convenience).

Each archive contains a SQL script that should be applied on a clean database with your database management tool (phpMyAdmin or whatever you use), and ‘media’ folder with sample product images that you should copy to your Magento media folder. You should then run the regular installation process as for a complete package. Please make sure that you have exactly the same version of Magento that the sample data is provided for – 0.7.15480.

Please also backup all your data and keep separately any custom changes on the files you did, because they may not be compatible with the sample data provided.

Upgrading Magento Comments

• Please backup your database and code before upgrading
• For users using APC; need to restart the server after PEAR upgrade
• XAMPP/WAMP Users - While testing upgrades from the PEAR channel, issues were discovered. At this time we do not recommend PEAR channel upgrades in these environments
• If you installed 0.714800 not using the PEAR installer, you can still use the PEAR channel upgrade (make sure all directories are writable for web server user) by going to Remote Extensions (admin) and clicking on Interface_Adminhtml_Default, Action tab and click install. Repeat same procedure for Interface_Frontend_Default and Interface_Install_Default.
• After upgrading, please logout to refresh the current installation
• Any issues? Let us know in the forums

Video: Upgrading Magento from PEAR Channel (One-Click Upgrade)

By popular demand, Paypal Website Payment Standard (IPN) will be available in Magento’s next release. Check out the video below.

Avid Magento fan and community member, Sean Culver, presented Magento in Bangkok’s first BarCamp. The event was a huge success and the response from the audience was great (the Magento stickers Sean printed certainly helped out).

What is BarCamp?

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Thanks for the initiative Sean! Magento thanks you greatly

photos courtesy blog.winginfotech.net, pigtheday. Additional BarCamp Bangkok photos on flickr.

We’ve had numerous requests for sample data for Magento’s latest release and are making it available. The archive file is available in .zip (40 MB), .tar.gz (40 MB), and .tar.bz2 (36MB) formats to download (the files contain exactly the same content inside and are provided in different formats just for your convenience).

Each archive contains a SQL script that should be applied on a clean database with your database management tool (phpMyAdmin or whatever you use), and ‘media’ folder with sample product images that you should copy to your Magento media folder. You should then run the regular installation process as for a complete package. Please make sure that you have exactly the same version of Magento that the sample data is provided for – 0.7.14800.

Please also backup all your data and keep separately any custom changes on the files you did, because they may not be compatible with the sample data provided.

As first presented back in April, Magento’s next release will feature dynamic design update control. This feature will allow complete control of the interface (layout, themes) on a per product and per category level with the ability to schedule changes by date.

In this video, we apply different themes to categories to show the design flexibility on a per-category level. The same process can be applied on a per product level (not shown in the video).

click to view larger version

As briefly presented in our Designing for Magento Webinar last week, Magento’s next release will feature a new tool that will make Magento designers’ and programmers’ lives easier; Template Path Hints. This tool will display the path and file name of the templates constructing the page viewed.

We hope you’ll like it