Magento

Hi, I promised to keep you posted on upcoming training.  We have courses starting February 28, 2011 (Core Principles of Theming with Magento) and March 7, 2011 (Fundamentals of Magento Development) in Los Angeles.  Do log onto www.magentocommerce.com/training for details and to register.  Demand is strong and seats are filling up as expected.  The site provides the full schedule for courses being held through June in the US as well as in Europe.  Courses are designed with formal instructional design principles and include in-depth hands-on exercises.  Students will receive their Magento Certificate of Completion after attending all days of instruction.

Contact us at with any questions. Look forward to seeing you there!

Hello, my name is Susie Sedlacek and I am Magento’s new Vice President of Training & Education and will be heading up all efforts around this function. I am most recently from Zend, where I ran Global Services as well as started and grew Zend Training and Certification in close collaboration with the Zend community and partners. I am excited to be on board at Magento, where functionality is deep and education and training is in need of expansion! Training and education is a strategic initiative at Magento and our vision is to be the source of an ever-expanding flow of core Magento knowledge that feeds the eco-system, enabling it to strengthen itself through strong interaction, collaboration and communication. So how does all this help you now ? Well for one, how about courses ready for delivery in February and a kickoff for a developer certification to be launched in 2011? 

Yes, starting on February 28th, here in Los Angeles, we will deliver our “Core Principles for Theming in Magento” course, which will be followed on March 7th, by our first ever course for developers “Fundamentals of Magento Development.” These courses are scheduled to be held monthly for the next six months across both the US and Europe. They will continue to be delivered around the world together with additional new courses going forward from that point on. 

We are developing the roadmap to extend the curriculum paths for each of our target audiences: business user; designer; developer; systems administrator. This roadmap will be made available on the site later this month.  Feel free to send me suggestions of training topics you think are needed most urgently at susie [@] magento.com.

While there are certainly different views on whether the Magento ecosystem needs a Developer Certification, we believe this will solve more issues than create them, based on inputs from the community and market.  We will be kicking off our search for an education advisory board from the community this month.  Interested?  Then send me an email and tell me why you would be an awesome addition to our Advisory Board.  Note there will be work to be done by Advisory Board members, so do write if you have time and energy to contribute to this effort.  Advisory Board seats are limited to ten.

Kara kicked off a great Summer Webinar series last year as well as did some extensive clean up of our Knowledge Base and online resources. The Webinars were met with great response and if you did not get to attend they are still available on our website at www.magentocommerce.com/media/webinars.

We will continue to upgrade our online resources with more quick and topic specific education and will blog about the enhancements as they become available. We have an awesome training team at Magento bolstered by some incomparable community members and partners all striving to make the eco-system superstars on optimizing Magento. 

I look forward to interacting with most of you in one fashion or another and I commit to blog often and when I have something valuable to share – so stay tuned!

Join us for an introduction to developing for Magento. Tomorrow’s webinar in our Summer Webinar Series will be a whirlwind tour of Magento’s programming framework and best practices for creating your own modules and correctly overwriting modules without editing core files.

This webinar is intended for developers familiar with PHP or object-oriented programming who are looking to get started with Magento. Also the perfect refresher for developers who have taught themselves Magento, but would like a fill in some knowledge gaps. Webinar is Thursday August 26th, at 9AM Pacific time (GMT-7). Register to join for the Developing for Magento Webinar. Space is limited, so register now!

Magento Mobile is almost ready to hit the streets. Tomorrow’s webinar in our Summer Webinar Series is a Magento Mobile Quick Start and will demo the Admin Panel and app building process (spoiler: it’s really easy). 

Join us if you’re interested in being the first in your gang to see Magento Mobile in action. Webinar is Thursday August 19th, at 9AM Pacific time (GMT-7). Register to join on the Summer Webinar Series page. Space is limited, so register now!

Join us for another Magento U webinar. Tuesday August 17th, at 9AM Pacific time, Magento U will be featuring their episode “OK, I’ve installed Magento, now what?”

Installing Magento is the first move towards creating a successful store but configuring your settings and content, as well as managing your categories, modules and themes is essential in its success.

Learn how to customize your store by changing themes, logos or even creating additional stores, the Magento U team will answer the most common questions and provide useful information about getting properly set up.

Don’t miss out on the valuable information we’re going to be sharing, register for the webinar here!

So much is going on all the time with Magento that it's easy to lose track of what new content is available in the Magento world and where to find it. I'll be posting semi-regularly to help flag new and interesting content for you. Our big initiatives over the last couple of weeks have been to update and refresh the Knowledge Base and to kick off our new Summer Webinar Series, so let's start there.

Knowledge Base Relaunch

Visit the Knowledge
Base

Summer Webinar Series Off and Running

Learn more about the
Summer Webinar
Series

So that's some of what's new for now. Watch for regular updates and, as always, feel free to contact me directly with your thoughts and feedback ().

We’re pleased to announce Magento’s first-ever Summer Webinar Series for learning about Magento.  We’ve taken some of the topics we get questions on most often from users who are getting started with Magento and turned them into a series of tutorial webinars.  This is a “Getting Started” webinar series, which is designed for beginning Magento users to walk you through how to use some of Magento’s core eCommerce functionality.

Check out the specific sessions and register at our Summer Webinar Series page. Space is limited, so register early!

Yep, you read it right!  I’ve been brought on at Magento to head up our education, training, and certification work. I’ve been a Magento user and advocate for well over two years and have been with Magento for about three months now. These past couple of months, I’ve been quietly working away in the background here, but we’re ready to start launching some changes and I’m eager to let you know what’s in the works for this year.

Some of our early work has been pure clean up--we’ve cleaned up and reorganized the wiki and are in the process of updating the online help info that’s available from your Magento Admin Panels. Some of you have already noticed that Koby and a crew of (most excellent) volunteer moderators have been working hard in response to your feedback to keep the forums spam-free and organized. In the next week or so, you’ll see the Knowledge Base relaunched with fresh content and ongoing updates. We’ve also targeted summer’s end for an updated, Magento Users’ Guide to be available. (The Designers’ Guide is being updated even as I type, and we have some great Knowledge Base articles coming to help developers get up to speed with Magento development.)

So, that’s some of the housekeeping, but what’s new? Training for one. Look to Magento to begin to offer training courses this fall for business users, designers, and developers. We’ll be kicking that off with a summer webinar series, focused on providing tutorials for some of the most often asked about topics (the announcement of those sessions and times will be later this week). We’ve also been blown away by some of the training some of you in the community are already offering and we want to be able to encourage and build on that. To support that, in addition to our own training, we’ll also be launching a Magento Training Partners program for those of you with the expertise to establish training as a part of your business to more effectively promote that business.

The other big initiative in the works is certification. Magento certification is much needed and will be a very tangible asset to those who earn it. So to ensure certification is meaningful and rigorous, we’re in the early planning stages of developing our certification criteria and materials. We’re targeting the end of 2010 for our first certification level and will continue to build out from there.

As with all things Magento, we want YOU. (Cue the old Uncle Sam posters for those of you who remember them.) Are you a Magento development company that already offers training to your clients and team? Are you a freelance technical writer or trainer with Magento expertise?  Are you a designer or developer with a flair for writing (and Magento)? Are you interested in writing articles about your Magento experiences for the Knowledge Base?  PM me or contact me at kara@magento.com. I’d love to hear from you. We have more opportunities than I can name as we build out this vital area within the Magento ecosystem!