Magento

We are pleased to announce the availability for download of Magento Preview version 0.6.13110. The biggest highlights of the release include performance gains, ability to control currencies on a per store level including enabling/disabling currencies from the Zend locale, and the finalization of the shipping and payment API's (see a recent wiki post on how to create a payment module).

Yoav, Varien's CTO discusses the release in the video below (recorded a few hours before the release):

--- RELEASE NOTES ---

Major Changes:

• Added product tags multistore functionality
• Implemented currency administration
• Currency rates updating via webservices was reworked, the tutorial on currency rate webservices integration will be posted in Magento blog soon
• Locale settings configuration added to choose allowed Zend_Locale data
• Fixed multiwebsite cache and sessions issues (i.e. different secure/nonsecure domains)
• Unified events and layouts names, documentation will follow soon
• Mage_Core, Mage_Checkout, Mage_Catalog, Mage_Cms and Mage_Review modules helpers implemented for better performance
• Improved countries and regions saving logic, saving ISO country codes rather then ids
• Few minor bugs fixed in installation wizard
• Added custom database port/socket setting in installation wizard
• Refactored controllers, moved operations from constructor to preDispatch
• Rewritten Mage_Log module
• Implemented cache management to allow disabling and enabling specific cache (configuration, layouts, blocks HTML output, EAV types and attributes, translations)
• Fixed theme translation loading

Known Issues:

• New allowed currency is immediately available in frontend that causes 'Undefined rate from "XXX-YYY"' messages and wrong calculations in shopping cart and checkout until the currency rates are updated
• Configurable product price doesn't use locale format to display

Over at the Varien Blog, we recently published a wrap-up post to a question we asked the Magento blog readers, ”What are your favorite eCommerce sites?”. Check out which sites made the cut.

In this video, we present Magento Groups which will provide the ability for users to get together in working groups to achieve certain goals and/or tasks. For example, a user can start a group to develop a specific payment module. Other users would then join this group and take part. Each group would have a blog and wiki that are used to communicate with each of the members of that group.

We expect groups to form on a wide array of topics that can include (for example) development, design, marketing, search engine optimization, drop shipping, fulfillment, localization, accounting, etc. The options are endless. The concept is important to further enhance the Magento community and provide a platform for communication. With the upcoming group functionality, users will be able to take specific action(s) to expand the Magento feature set and discuss a wide array of topics that are of interest.

Magento Groups is expected to be available within 30-45 days with multi-lingual support.

A nice surprise for a Thursday afternoon ... Can you make out what it says?

Creating customized transactional e-mails like new account alerts and order confirmations is made easy with Magento’s Transactional E-mail templates. In this screencast, learn how to create transactional e-mails and assign them to different actions within your store.

The first international community page is now online at de.magentocommerce.com and features the German Community (our most active).

Herzlich Willkommen in der deutschen Community!

Additional international pages will be launched in the weeks ahead.

In this video, Minu discusses the design documentation process and gives a short introduction to Magento’s design blocks. Minu is responsible for Magento’s UI design including the demo store (AKA Magento’s first design package), Community Site, and Admin Interface.

We've posted a Wiki article with an overview on how to create a payment module in Magento. The document is based on an almost complete implementation of the API and we expect the final changes to be minimal.

If you'd like to take a shot at integrating your favorite payment gateway, the article is the place to start.