Magento

Happy One Month Anniversary Magento Answers!

Greetings Magento Community,

Magento Answers is one month old today and in honor of this occasion, we're releasing a new navigation menu. We hope this new menu helps you to better maneuver your way around answers and quickly jump to key sections of interest. Now you can not only view the questions and topics that you directly follow, but also see questions and activity that you're not directly following.

The navigation bar is broken down into a few sections so you can manage what you're following, global activity and your profile and settings. Here's a quick rundown of all the options now available:

Following Section

• Your Feed - This is a real-time list of all questions related to topics, questions or people you are following. Click Subscription Settings to change and update Your Feed.
• Unanswered Questions - This link displays questions that you are following (i.e. Your Feed) but only the ones which haven't received a response yet.
• Topics - This link allows you to quickly jump to and manage the topics which you're currently following.

Global Section

• All Unanswered Questions - This is a real-time list of all questions in all topics, that have not received a response.
• All Topics - This link jumps to the complete list of Magento Answers topics. You can easily manage all topics from this link.
• All Activity - This link allows you to quickly view all recent activity regardless of following status.

Your Profile

• This option directly links directly to your profile and allows you to view your own recent activity feed

Your Settings

• Customize your Feed - This option links you to the Answers topic page where you can search for topics and organize your feed.
• Subscription Settings - This option allows you to manage your subscription settings and notifications.
• Send Feedback - This link allows you to to leave a message for us, with feedback, questions or other information.

We hope this new menu helps you feel more comfortable navigating around answers. Let us know what you think, and please continue to send us feedback . We look forward to hearing from you!

Rhonda

Update 11:00PM Friday June 10th

And we are BACK! Please

We’re Upgrading MagentoCommerce.com

We will be upgrading the MagentoCommerce.com website tonight beginning at 10:00PM Pacific Standard Time. This planned maintenance will help improve the site’s performance and capacity.

While we are undergoing the upgrade, the entire magentocommerce.com site will be inaccessible. Work will begin at approximately 10:00PM tonight (PST) and will last around 1 hour.

Stay tuned to our Twitter account for real-time updates.  We will update both Twitter and this blog post when our planned maintenance is complete.

Magento Answers Update and Tips - Week 3

Greetings Magento Community

Magento Answers is really taking off! Once again, thank you all for your continued participation. While keeping you up to date with the progress on Magento Answers, we'll continue to provide valuable tips for you to use as you get more comfortable with the system. Here's a few for this week:

Improvements to Topics

The first thing you may have noticed about Magento Answers this week is how hard we're working hard on Topic control. Remember - meaningful topics helps Answers run smoothly and allows members to find true topics of interest. This also assures you that your question will receive maximum visibility from the community and get a faster response.

Most Active Topics

Keep an eye on Most Active topics. These are topics that have a large amount of followers, and in many cases, the most activity.

The most active Topics on Magento Answers this week are in the How Do I? category. Other high interest topics include Development, Theming, and Extensions. If you have questions for any of these topics, don't hesitate to get them up and have them addressed by our awesome Magento community members, moderators, staff and our Expert Consulting Group.

Quick Note about Voting

Voting on Answers is a good way for members to find trustworthy sources of Magento-related information. If you see someone who's given a great answer, be sure to give the vote a bump up. Let them know you appreciate their activity.

Member Spotlight

Finally, I'd like to give a shout-out to Osyris who's been one of our most active members this week. Thank you for your participation and keep up the good work!

That's it for now! Coming up next week - look for improved navigation options, better activity stream, and a way to flag answers as helpful. Keep sending us feedback to and you know where to if you have any questions.

Rhonda

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.