Magento

Magento’s upcoming 1.1 release will feature significant feature enhancements, including Custom Production Options (CPO) as seen in the video. CPO has been a widely requested feature by the community and we are excited to make it available as part of the upcoming release (expected by early July).

In this video, we show…

• The new Custom Options tab in the simple product view.
• Adding new options for color (drop-down), size (drop-down), and monogram (text field). Available input types include: text field, text area, drop-down, radio buttons, checkbox and multi-select.
• Adding $15 for the Monogram option.
• Viewing the updated simple product on the fronted with the Custom Options available for the customer to select.

Please note that the CPO module is still in development and minor changes are expected prior to the release. Magento 1.1 public alpha is currently available via SVN.

We’ll be posting daily ‘behind the scenes’ mobile photos of our team as we push forward with the upcoming launch of Magento 1.0 (expected in the next few days, by March 31). If you have a Facebook account, join us in the Magento Facebook group.

A few samples are below:

The Designer's Guide to Magento has been prepared for you to learn and expand your knowledge of the structural, conceptual workings and methods of designing for Magento—It will basically teach you what you need to know to begin building a store of your own with Magento.

The documentation is largely sectioned into the following chapters and can be skipped through back and forth in order to quickly access only the information you need most. However, because each chapter acts as a prelude to the next, we advise you to follow along with the documentation in the order it was written:

1. Magento Design Terminologies
2. Working with Magento Themes
3. Building Your Theme
4. Intro to Layouts

The Designer's Guide to Magento can be found at www.magentocommerce.com/design_guide

We are excited to showcase the screenshot of the Magento demo-store homepage. This design will also be used as the first design package released with Magento. We are working nights to bring you Magento Beta1 (preview) in these next few days (and yes, it could be as late as the 31st, but certainly in August), and thought you might like a taste of how the front-end will appear in full color. Click on the image below to see a full-size version.

With the release of the Beta1, Preview version of Magento approaching in the next couple of weeks we present a sneak peek of the Magento Admin Panel.

Today we will take a look at creating a new category in the Magento Admin. Click on the picture to bring up a full size version.

The first thing to do is select the store where you would like to add the category from the stores dropdown menu. The default is for all stores managed by the admin panel, but you can elect to create the category in only one of the stores by selecting that store.

After that you will need to enter a name for the category which will appear on the sites selected. You can then select the location the category will be located in. The default is root, meaning the category will be a top-level category. If you select an existing category the new category will be created as a sub-category of the one you selected.

You can then enter a description, upload an image and enter meta information for the category.

After that it really gets interesting. If you would like customers to be taken to a landing page - instead of the standard product listing page - when they select the category, you can select a page from the Landing Page dropdown. This list will contain all the landing pages created in the Magento CMS. An example would be to create a Nike landing page and directing all customers to that landing page when they select the Nike category.

You then have 3 options for the look and feel of this category page. The default is Display Products Only, which will show the customer a grid list of the products. The second is display only Landing Page, which will display the landing page selected in the above dropdown, and the third is Display Landing Page and Products. This third option will place the content from the selected landing page above the grid list of products.

You then select whether the category is active on the site. Selecting no will hide the category on the site.

Finally you select whether the category page is an anchor. Anchors are used for the Layered Navigation in Magento.

If you set the category to be an Anchor the layered navigation (see this post for a look at the layered navigation) will display the sub-categories of this category in the layered navigation. The layered navigation then takes all the products underneath, including ones in the sub-categories, and displays all the filterable attributes of those products. If you do not set the category as an Anchor it will not display the filterable attributes in the layered navigation.

Here is a look at the layered navigation for the Apparel category which is set to be an anchor.

After that you can select products to populate the category from the Category Products tab and you have created a new category for your online store.

In many popular eCommerce solutions marketing features like coupons and tier pricing are expensive or difficult to integrate. Some Store Owners choose not to bother and miss out on valuable marketing features which can improve conversion rates. Magento is different. We believe that all store owners should have these features without costly integration struggles.

Magento includes a full set of marketing features out of the box. Varien's CTO Yoav Kutner says Magento's marketing tools are "second to none," but we'll let you decide. Included in the Beta 1 release are the following:

Tier Pricing: This feature rewards customers who purchase multiples of an item at a time. Buying one item might cost $10.25, while buying two or more will cost $9.25 each, three or more $8.25 each, etc. Store Owners set the prices and the limits, giving them complete control.

Coupons: We've also included a robust coupon tool, allowing Store Owners to create simple coupons for everything from rewarding long-time customers to promoting holiday specials.

Store Owners can define the following for a simple coupon:

• Start date / end date
• Discount % or $
• Free shipping
• Valid product list
• Valid category list
• Number of total uses
• Number of uses per customer

With these tools, Store Owners can execute promotions like special gifts for repeat customers or a weekly coupon restricted to the first 20 customers to use it.

To create more complex promotions Magento includes a Rule-Based Pricing System managed through its Catalog. There are two areas a Store Owner can apply rules to: The Shopping Cart and the Catalog.

The Shopping Cart Price Rules are applied on the shopping cart page and act as coupons. Rules can be highly specific here, unlike in the simple coupon. For example, a Store Owner can create a shopping cart rule that gives 10% off any Cook Book (a subcategory of books, in this example), and also gives 50% off one Boston Red Sox coffee mug. The Store Owner can then limit the time for this promotion to a date range of July 14th-August 27th. Now the Store Owner assigns it the code "summerbaseball," and any customer who uses this code when checking out with cook books and a Red Sox coffee mug will receive the discount.

Catalog Price Rules are the tools used for storewide or category-wide promotions. Each valid product will receive the discount with no need for coupon codes. For example, a Store Owner wants to have a month-long sale in July and create a catalog rule called "July Sale" setting the date range to July 1st - July 31st. During this time, all products by manufacturer HP get 10% off. Also, all products of the "type" computer get 15% off. Since the store contains computers manufactured by HP, this can create an overlap. So, when creating the price rule, the Store Owner can choose to give computers built by HP either 10% or 15% off (by deciding which condition has precedence). The Store Owner could even add a third condition to "July Sale" that computers built by HP are 25% off.

Both the The Shopping Cart and Catalog rules can be applied to specific customer groups, making marketing even more flexible for Store Owners.

We can't wait to see how you use Magento's marketing capabilities when August rolls around. Let us know what you think in the comments.

The first thing a majority of your customers will do on your site is search for a product, and you want to make sure that you can give them the best search experience possible.  We’re here to help.  Magento’s search lets Store Owners get the most out of their search capabilities, and helps your Customers find exactly the item they’re searching for as quickly and easily as possible.

Magento will provide on-the-fly auto-completion of searches, giving suggested search terms and number of results directly below the search box. As a customer types printer, for example, the search box will fill in relevent searches with result totals, such as in the screenshot of Google Search below:

Magento also features advanced search, which allows Customers to search by Product Attributes defined by you, the Store Owner (for example: price range, manufacturer, category, etc). You’ll also have the ability to redirect certain search terms (to a custom landing page for advertising purposes, for example), and create synonyms for frequently misspelled words (typing “Mangeto” will automatically switch to “Magento,” for example), leaving complete control of the site’s search system in your hands.

This is only the beginning of where Magento can take your site’s search system.  In the future, the search will allow for misspellings, alternate spellings, and plurals of search keywords, helping your customers find exactly what they want.

Stay tuned for next week when you get to meet us, the team behind Magento, in the new Magento Videos and a brand new Magento website! You won’t want to miss them!