Magento

Magento Answers Updates

Greetings Magento Community,

Thank you for getting active with us on Magento Answers. We’ve only been up for two weeks but we’re getting a steady stream of questions averaging about 100 each week.  This means we have over 200 questions on Magento Answers and we can see the activity rising with each passing day. Over the last weeks, our team has been working on some initial enhancements and modifications which may not necessarily be visible to you. These changes include work on our admin panel, so that (as moderators of Answers) we’ll have better control over Magento Answers, making it better organized and easier for you to find interesting questions, answers, people and topics.

Recent Activity - Quick Stats

As promised, we’d keep you posted of some interesting Answers facts and stats. Here is a breakdown of some of the recent activity on Magento Answers:

• There have been over 100 questions added to Magento Answers in the last 7 days.
• Of those questions, the topics with the most followers (in order of popularity) are Programming, Theming, Development, Extensions, and Module Development—so you should get your questions in to these large-audience topics.

• Of the top folks answering on Magento Answers, it’s no surprise that Magento Forum Moderators Sherrie and Brent W Peterson make the top of the list along with, our Expert Consulting Group.
• Also, not surprisingly, for 2 weeks in a row the most viewed, answered and followed question is What’s your favorite ‘live’ Magento store? with over 20 responses and over 1000 views. We encourage you to join in the topic and post your favorites! (Don’t forget to use images).

Just a fast reminder: Please add topics to your questions.  Many members prefer following topics, over questions—if your topic is not categorized you may not get the audience you desire. I cannot stress the importance of meaningful topics.

Keep Sending Us Feedback

Finally, we’ve received a tremendous amount of feedback about Magento Answers and with many of the most recent changes happening on the back-end, it’s time to give some visibility to our front end and talk about known issues and upcoming improvements. We are going to be spending a great deal of time improving navigation and here’s a few changes that are in progress, and coming soon:

• Improved member profiles including graphs representing activity on Answers
• Better question and topic browsing options including the ability to browse all recent activity regardless of following status, and ability to see uncategorized questions
• Improved control over objects that you are following
• Improved commenting and response—as well as the ability to mark a question as officially “Answered”
• Improved Activity Stream, Navigation and more! Stay tuned!

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Over the coming weeks, as our team begins releasing these enhancements, we’ll be updating you every step of the way. One of our priorities, is that our Magento Answers community members have the best user experience possible, and this is why your feedback is so important. Please send your feedback directly to us at and stay tuned for more updates.

Rhonda

Magento Answers Updates

A week ago we launched our public beta of Magento Answers Since then, we've have seen strong participation and feedback. In fact, 99% of questions submitted through Magento Answers have answers. Even while in this early stage, Magento Answers is providing value to our community. As stats begin to roll in, we'll report on top posters, top threads and superstar contributors. We'll also be updating you regularly on new features, as they are enabled. I'm really looking forward to this new way of getting involved with the Community through Magento Answers.

Magento Answers Tips

In order to get the most out of Magento Answers, and your questions answered as quickly as possible, here are a few tips and best practices to help you out:

• When you come to Answers for the first time, you are directed to the Get Started page. Get started by adding topics. As you add topics, the stream on the right will populate with questions from those topics. Once you follow 5 or more topics, you'll be directed to Magento Answers homepage where you can now view your feed.

• Adding topics is very important to Magento Answers, as people follow the topics that interest them the most. If you add "Looking for Code snippet - Help" as a topic, it may not get any followers or an audience. We'll be taking great strides to make sure our topics are accurate, and followable and will remove and edit topics as necessary. Please do your best to make your topics meaningful.
• For troubleshooting questions, accuracy is even more important. Please be as specific as possible and add the version of Magento you are using along with any other details which may be important for our Community experts to know.
• Use images and the code tag! The editor is there for your convenience.
• Are you looking for your activity feed? Click on your Avatar on Answers and you'll see all your recent activity, including which topics were followed and unfollowed.
• Have we mentioned that our Expert Consulting Group (ECG) is on Magento Answers and looking for challenging questions? They like a good challenge, so I'm challenging you to bring your questions over to Magento Answers.

I would like to give a special shout-out to some of the folks who got very active with us, during our private beta and gave us some invaluable initial feedback and just what we needed to get started. So, in no particular order, thank you to: Josh Pratt, Damian Culotta, Robert van Kemenade, Simon Lilly (along with Forum Moderators) Tom Robertshaw and Brent Peterson.

And we want to hear more. Magento Answers is in Beta and that means we'll be adding new features and capabilities as we go along and we need to hear from you! Your feedback is what will power Magento Answers to be a strong community powered tool. Please email us your feedback .

Meet Magento - Netherlands 2011

The annual Meet Magento Netherlands was held last Thursday, May 19 in the quaint town of Ede. In its third year, the one day conference grew considerably from the previous year with over 300 attendees, community members, speakers and sponsors. The program featured more than twenty speakers with a mix of Magento keynotes, from Bob Schwartz and Baruch Toledano, in-depth technical breakouts and interesting marketing sessions.

Magento Passion

Throughout the event you could feel the passion for Magento! Many of the attendees were excited to be there and learn more about Magento. The energy started right from the opening session from Meet Magento organizer and host, Guido Jansen, and enthusiastic moderator, Anouschka Laheÿ.

Click on Images to Enlarge

In the closing session, Anouschka asked Bob Schwartz what struck him most about the event. Besides joking about his difficulty pronouncing Dutch names, Bob said, "The energy here is great! All of the attendees and partners are fantastic. I have had so many interesting conversations about how they can expand beyond the borders and go global."

The sponsors kept the buzz going with creative elements to their booths. The Copernica attendees showed their spirit by coordinating in red ties and Converse sneakers, Byte Internet had girls dressed in costume and Kega was even giving away a ticket to the Magento Developers Paradise for a referral of a developer that gets hired by the company.

The event closed with a high energy drawing of 28 giveaways from sponsors that totaled over €10.000 with the top prizes awarded to Karin Troustgeschenk for a remote helicopter and Tom Nieuwenhuis of Scorg IT for a Magento U training.

Thank You

Thank you to all of our sponsors for your continued support of the Magento community!

Platinum Sponsors: Realvine, Emailvision, Exact & Dealer4Dealer

Gold Sponsors: ABC Mail, Byte Internet, Copernica, Icepay, Jira ICT, Madia, MediaCT, Multisafepay, 42 Functions, 100% Magento

Silver Sponsors: aheadWorks, Emperium, Kega, Nic. Oud, PayPal, XLS Hosting, Zebd

Following the close of the event, Magento held a special meeting with all Solution Partners in attendance. The summit featured interactive discussions between Magento management and partners, and allowed them to provide important feedback.

A very special thank you to Guido Jansen, Mark Dekkers, Tanja de Boer and all community members who made the event possible! Stayed tuned for more Meet Magento events this fall!

Photos by Ray Bogman from http://www.jira.nl

See more photos from the event on Meet Magento Netherlands flickr stream!

Ever wonder what it’s like at the Magento HQ in Los Angeles? For our Meet Magento events this week in Germany and Netherlands, we produced a video tour showing behind the scenes footage of our wonderful team in action. We had a great time producing the video and hope you’ll enjoy it!

Meet Magento (Leipzig, Germany) Highlights from Day 2

The Legendary After Show Party

Back by popular demand, the after show party was held at Moritzbastei, the premiere cultural and nightlife venue in Leipzig. This massive venue is entirely architected from brick walls and intimate caves that create a truly unique experience for conversations and networking. Throughout the night attendees dined on excellent cuisine and a variety of German beer, wine and cocktails.

At 10:00 PM, the over 350 attendees ventured to the roof for an exciting fire-breather show and spectacle of fireworks. Definitely a first for a Magento event, but the party didn’t stop there! Back inside attendees had caricatures drawn and danced to the DJ into the early morning hours.

Keynote address by Baruch Toledano

After a fun night at the after show party in Meet Magento, Leipzig, Baruch Toledano, Director of Product Marketing, gave the second day keynote on Magento product updates. Baruch shared an insight into Magento’s guidelines for developing new features. He provided a closer look into the upcoming features and roadmap for all Magento’s products including Enterprise and Community Editions, Mobile and Magento Go.

The lighthearted humor and entertainment helped awaken attendees for the technical content including, the Imagine eCommerce Conference “I’m a coder” music video and his aspirations for Oktoberfest.

The keynote also included statistics on how successful Magento Go has been since its launch. Magento Go received thousands of registrations on the day it went live and continues to receive hundreds of new merchants everyday from over 15 countries.

Baruch also provided an insight to the Magento Go platform, which is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution that allows developers to build, host and deploy custom applications to be used by merchants for Magento Go stores.

Thank You to the Magento European Marketing Team!

At the opening of the Tuesday general session, Bob Schwartz and Michel Goossens took the opportunity to thank the Magento European Marketing Team who organized the conference. The ‘A Team’ that we like to call them, is lead by Thomas Fleck and includes Alice Patzer, Annemarie Tappert and Andrea Panajotowa. These talented ladies received flowers and warm applause by all attendees. This was my first Meet Magento working with the ‘A Team’ and I was impressed with their efficient execution and creativity!

We would like to thank all of our sponsors for your continued support of the Magento ecosystem. You are truly vital to the success of Meet Magento!

Platinum Sponsors: Netresearch, PayPal, Trusted Shops, BillPay, AOE media, MeinPaket.de/DHL, next commerce, Mittwald CM Service, Moneybookers, Internet24, TechDivision, Payone, Hitmeister, ExperCash, mad geniuses GmbH, Celebros, ClickandBuy, Hostway Deutschland GmbH, dotSource, epoq, Ogone and Comarch.

Gold Sponsors: PSW Group, netz98, ConKred and Burügel.

Silver Sponsors: Votum media Gmbh, Symmetrics, Emailvision and Copernica.

Event Sponsors: Phoenix Medien, Computop, SysEleven, SysEleven, Billsafe and Emailvision.

Next up: Meet Magento Netherlands on Thursday, May 19. We hope to see you there!

Click to Enlarge
Photos Courtesy of Marc Lieven Spur

Stay tuned to our flickr stream for more photos of the event.

Upcoming Magento Events

Whether you're looking for training, a live event, or a webinar, Magento has an event for you. See below for a list of training and events for the remainder of May. Attend an event in your area, or join one online!

Events May 16 through May 20

Meet Magento Germany - May 16/17

Join Magento, eCommerce experts and 500 merchants for two adventure-filled days of engaging dialogue and networking at the Meet Magento Conference in Leipzig, Germany.
Meet Magento is in progress! If you can't be there, watch the event live beginning again May 17th at 9am CET (Central European Time - 12:00am PST) http://live.meet-magento.de/

Magento Training May 16-May 20

Training is taking place this week in Chicago, IL this week with Fundamentals of Magento Development and Core Principles for Theming in Magento. Learn more about training opportunities here: Magento Training

Tuesday, May 17 · 11:00am - 12:30pm

Upcoming Webinar: Improve Customer Loyalty - Increase Sales

Sponsored by Magento and Sweet Tooth- [Register Now]
Craving customer loyalty? Sweet Tooth offers you endless ways to bring the most customized promotions and loyalty programs to your customers. As the premier points and loyalty program for Magento, Sweet Tooth is the most flexible and robust way to develop and leverage customer loyalty for e-commerce. Sponsored by Magento and Sweet Tooth!

Tuesday, May 17 · 2:00pm - 5:00pm

eCommerce Forum - Kansas City, MO- Sponsored by Digital Evolution

Join us for appetizers on May 17th from 2-5pm at the Boulevard Brewery in Kansas City, MO! Sponsored by Digital Evolution! Learn More: http://mgn.to/f6dP2e or [Register Now]

Thursday, May 19 · 8:00am

Meet Magento Netherlands

For more information, visit: http://www.meet-magento.nl
The third Meet Magento Netherlands conference is taking place on May 19, 2011. Organized again by Magento’s Dutch Community Manager, Guido Jansen, the event will feature presentations on various Magento topics including tips, tricks and the latest innovations in the Magento ecosystem.

Thursday, May 19 · 8:00am - 10:00am

eCommerce Forums - San Diego, CA - Sponsored by: Digital Operative

Join us for breakfast on May 19th 8:00am - 10:00am for our eCommerce Forum at the Hard Rock hotel in San Diego! sponsored by Digital Operative! Learn More: http://mgn.to/f6dP2eor [Register Now]

Events May 23 through May 27

Monday, May 23 - May 27 - Paris France

Training: Fundamentals of Magento Development

Learn more training opportunities here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/services/course-schedule or [Register Now]

Tuesday, May 24 · 8:00am - 11:00am

Salon eCom -- Geneva

For more information, visit: http://www.salon-ecom.com/

Tuesday, May 24 · 8:30am - 11:00am

eCommerce Forums - Palo Alto, CA - sponsored by Cignex

Join us for breakfast at the Crowne Plaza at the Cabana Hotel. Learn More: http://mgn.to/f6dP2e or [Register Now]

Wednesday, May 25 · 5:00pm - 7:30pm

eCommerce Forums - Cleveland, OH - sponsored by Metrics Marketing Group!

Join us for Appetizers from 5-730. Learn More: http://mgn.to/f6dP2e or [Register Now]

May 25 · 2:00 pm ET

Upcoming Webinar: Don’t Abandon Your Cart Abandoners - Sponsored by Magento and Listrak

Magento Extension from Listrak Helps Merchants Increase Revenue![Register Now]
Presenters: Ross Kramer, Listrak CEO and Phil Robinson, Magento VP of Business Development.

Wednesday, May 25 · 5:00pm - 7:30pm

eCommerce Forums - Cleveland, OH - Sponsored by Metrics Marketing Group

Join us for appetizers! Sponsored by Metrics Marketing Group. Learn More: http://mgn.to/f6dP2e

Wednesday, May 25 · 6:30pm - 9:00pm

eCommerce Forums - Magento HQ - Culver City - Sponsored by: (Silk Software, Spiegel Design Group, Ciplex, EYEMAGINE)

Join us for Appetizers at Magento Head Quarters in Culver City! Learn More http://mgn.to/f6dP2e or [Register Now]

Wednesday, May 26 · 6:30pm - 9:00pm

eCommerce Forums - Ann Arbor, MI - Sponsored by: Grand River Interactive

Learn More http://mgn.to/f6dP2e or [Register Now]

Don't delay! Sign up for a Magento event Today!

Meet Magento Germany Featured a Solution Partner Summit Today

The Summit gave over 30 partner attendees from Germany and Switzerland, the chance to have an interactive dialogue with the Magento team. Scott Dahlgren and Michel Goosens presented the Magento roadmap and insights into how partners can maximize their potential for success. The gathering also allowed partners to provide feedback and voice questions.

Scott Dahlgren commented, “The momentum for Magento is incredible and solution partners are one of the biggest beneficiaries of this momentum because we rely on their customer implementations.”

We thank all the partners who participated in the Summit and all partners in attendance at Meet Magento Germany.

Click to Enlarge
Photos Courtesy of Marc Lieven Spur

Meet Magento Germany Now Live!

The fifth Meet Magento Germany is currently underway in Leipzig, Germany with over 500 attendees and sponsors. The two day conference features Magento keynotes, business and developer sessions and networking opportunities. Don’t miss all the action by watching live at http://live.meet-magento.de/

Here are some highlights from the conference so far:

Sunday, May 15

An intimate reception and dinner was held last night for our 35 sponsors. We thank you for your continued support of Magento and the Meet Magento events. All sponsors can be found at http://www.meet-magento.de/partner.html

Monday, May 16

Bob Schwartz, President of Magento, opened the conference with the first keynote, “Speed + eCommerce.” Here are some highlights from Bob’s keynote:

• Personal account of his travels and why he “loves Germany,” complete with photos of his drive from Leipzig to Berlin in a Porsche.
• Industry overview on the compression of the sales cycle
• “Hollywood” movie featuring Magento Co-Founder and CEO, Roy Rubin, from the Magento Headquarters in Los Angeles.
• Roy provided the German attendees with a tour of the Magento offices and insight into the future plans for Magento.
• Roy announced new initiatives and products such as Magento Answers, Magento GO Platform, Magento Connect and the start of Magento 2.0 and the goal of having a 1 billion dollar store on Magento by the end of this year.
• The film also provided company updates on the new Magento website, Magento University training and the Imagine eCommerce Conference.

The rest of the Los Angeles Magento team in attendance are Michel Goosens, VP of EMEA Sales, Baruch Toledano, Director of Product Marketing, Scott Dahlgren, Senior Director of Worldwide Channels and Brittany Blattler, Manager of Global Events.

Photos Courtesy of Marc Lieven Spur. Click Image to Enlarge

Keep watching our Flikr Stream for more photos!

Stay tuned for more news from Meet Magento Germany and photos from the popular after show party at Moritzbastei in Leipzig!