Magento is pleased to add aheadWorks Co., a market leading vendor of extensions, themes and custom development services for the Magento platform, as a Silver Industry Partner.

aheadWorks develops attractive themes and feature-rich extensions for Magento Enterprise, Community and Go platforms that help merchants handle a wide range of business tasks, enhance the functionality of their online store and ultimately better satisfy their clients’ needs.

Magento merchants can choose from a palette of themes and templates that can give their online shop an attractive look and feel, and create a wonderful user experience for customers.

It’s a great pleasure to be recognized among professionals who are developing powerful extensions for Magento and aiming to make this popular platform even better. Being a Magento Silver Partner means great responsibility for the products you develop and services you provide. aheadWorks welcomes this responsibility as we guarantee the quality of everything we do -- Matvei Krivoshein CMO, aheadWorks

We invite you to visit Magento Connect to view the many aheadWorks extensions for Magento.

We have just launched the Magento Enterprise Premium package, the ultimate packaged solution for large-scale eCommerce implementations. This package has been tailored specifically for large-scale eCommerce implementations that need the scale, expertise and support necessary to run a high volume business.

Here are the components we are pleased to offer, as part of this new, premium solution:

• Multiple Magento Enterprise licenses - 2 production and 1 development license
• Platinum level SLA Magento Support with live 24x7 phone support
• Magento Expert Consulting - architectural advisory and comprehensive code review dedicated to your business needs
• Training course “eCommerce with Magento”

With this new package, merchants get the advantage of the best-in-class features of Magento Enterprise, such as multi-store fronts with a single admin interface, persistent shopping cart, RMA, private sales, marketing and merchandising tools and so much more, all with the added support, consulting, training and scalability to meet the needs of your eCommerce business.

We are very excited to offer this and invite you to learn more about this new, premium offering.


-The Magento team

Integration with other database technologies has been made easy with support for relational database management systems (RDBMS) in the release of Magento Community 1.6 / Enterprise 1.11. Andrey Tserkus, lead of RDBMS adoption team, shares his passion and perspective on the project

When did Magento decide that supporting multiple RDBMS was necessary?

From the first release of Magento, we intended to make the platform cross-DB compatible. We want developers to be able to run Magento on a variety of different database vendors. The initial architecture was designed with this feature in mind and, for several good reasons, MySQL was chosen as the base RDBMS to be supported.

So why is now the right time to begin supporting multiple RDBMS?

A lot has changed. Magento has experienced tremendous growth since those early days. Magento always focuses on providing a lot of features out-of-the-box with the ability to

customize and extend the capabilities of the platform. Along the way we have enjoyed wide adoption of the Magento platform by many types of businesses – from small emerging shops to mature corporations – and with this came the demand to support

different RDBMS.

Why is supporting multiple RDBMS so important to Magento’s recent version release?

The Magento Community 1.6 / Enterprise 1.11 release fulfills the dreams that our system architects had four years ago -- giving our users a platform that is capable of communicating with the database of their choice. With the simplified and refactored DB-abstraction layer, the implementations of Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server support, and the capacity to allow developers to automatically make their customization and extensions cross-DB compatible, we accomplished our goal of providing a cross-database compatible eCommerce platform.

By releasing this guide, we welcome everyone to obtain viable, technical information on the RDBMS changes we have made, so that developers can learn how to get the most from working with Magento in their system.

T3n, Germany's leading print magazine revolving around e-Business, open source and web technologies, recently awarded Magento the coveted “Best Shop System” award at the ConventionCamp internet conference award ceremony in Hanover, Germany. For eight weeks, readers of the magazine voted on the most innovative and pioneering products, projects and services, casting over 60,000 votes, 20,000 nominations within 18 categories. Magento was one of ten finalists in the “Best Shop System” category.

We are thrilled that we were chosen by so many people as their preferred eCommerce platform. Germany has one of the most developed eCommerce markets in Europe and is home to a very large and growing Magento community.

"At Magento, we have a clear mission: empower the eCommerce ecosystem for success,” said Phil Robinson, Magento Vice President of Business Development, at the award ceremony. “We look forward to continue providing innovative solutions to this flourishing industry.”

To support the breakneck pace of our growth, we’re building out the Magento Sales Leadership team. I’m excited to share two pieces of news about our growing team.

Jary Carter is moving into a new role as Head of Worldwide Sales and Channel. In this new role, Jary will be responsible for Magento sales around the world. He’ll oversee the sales and channel organizations, including our Customer Success Group.

Since joining Magento as Head of North American Sales and Channel in September of 2010, Jary has been instrumental in building and rolling out a new sales model, hiring a high-performance sales team, and helping to drive revenue growth. We’re excited about the contributions that Jary will make to Magento and X.commerce as a global sales leader.

I’m also excited to introduce a new sales leader to the Magento team: Ben Pressley. Ben joined us last week as Head of North American Sales. Ben has extensive sales and leadership experience in open source software, and has held several positions with Novell’s Linux business. He received his undergraduate degree in organizational behavior from the University of Colorado and holds a Masters of Information Systems from the University of Utah.

Please join me in welcoming Ben, and in wishing Ben and Jary the best of luck in their new roles!

The advantage of Facebook as a marketing tool for your online store just became a lot more powerful. Magento has introduced support for the new “Want” and “Own” Facebook buttons, driving social based traffic for all Magento online stores. The social buttons can be easily installed on product and catalog pages and are provided as a Magento core extension for Magento Community and Enterprise.

	Customers can now express themselves better than ever by adding items they “Want” on their Facebook pages for everyone to see and buy for them). Wish lists and Facebook profiles can now be closely linked.
	With the “Own” button marketing goes organic as consumers showcase items they are proud to own. Your customers become an extension of your marketing efforts as they are now able to answer questions, write reviews and provide recommendations on the products they own.

Magento is the first eCommerce platform to offer integration for the “Want” and “Own” buttons with the Facebook Open Graph 2.0 extension. Give your products and your business the latest Facebook connection.

This feature is available for Magento Enterprise and Community only.

We launched Magento U at our Imagine eCommerce Conference this past February to support the growing need for trained Magento developers, designers and systems administrators. Since that time we’ve run dozens of classes throughout the United States and Europe, training hundreds of students.

As demand for the Magento platform continues to escalate, the need for developers who are trained on the best practices for developing on Magento continues to grow around the world. In fact, demand has been so strong that it has outpaced our ability to provide enough courses in all requested locations.

That’s why I am excited to tell you that we now offer Magento U courses on-demand. These online versions of our classroom courses will make it easier for students anywhere in the world to access this training direct from Magento.

Learn Magento From Anywhere, Anytime

Magento U On-Demand courses let you enjoy the benefits of Magento’s expert instruction from anywhere at any time. Now, you can work Magento U training into your schedule, without having to travel to the classroom.

Two On-Demand Courses, More Coming Soon

We have taken our very successful “Fundamentals of Magento Development” course and are making it available in this new format so that it is more readily accessible to developers worldwide.

Additionally, we are also launching a new 3-part serial course titled “Managing Your Magento Store.” This series of courses – available only On-Demand, focuses on the Magento admin panel in the following three areas: Catalog Management, Product Marketing and Operations. Part 1 in the series – Catalog Management – is available now, Parts 2 & 3 will be available shortly.

Free for a Limited Time

To celebrate the launch of Magento U On-Demand Training, we’re making all of our online courses available for free for a short introductory period. Now you can benefit from the expert instruction and learn Magento best practices entirely for free!

To learn more about Magento U On-Demand courses and to register for your free courses, please visit our Magento U course catalog.