Magento

Time to Update Your Extensions!

Greetings Developers,

You may have noticed that we’ve made some changes to the Magento Connect extension profile page, and you may have also noticed that you may not always have the ability select a 2.0 extension key for every extension. We’ve made these changes based on developer feedback, and to help developers have more control over which versions of an extension they’d like to support.

Significant Changes

The only significant change, is that Magento will no longer automatically generate extension keys for 2.0 (1.5 and later versions of Magento) unless the developer specifies that he wishes to support that version by checking the 1.5 check-box when creating or editing an extension. Keep in mind, in order for your free extension to have the ability to support both versions, it must be uploaded from the file generated in the var/pear directory during the packaging process. Any file uploaded from var/connect will only be able to be listed for 2.0 (Magento 1.5 and later versions).

What this Means for You

If you are the developer of a 1.4 extension, and have not tested or marked that extension as 1.5 compatible on the extension profile page, you will not have a 2.0 version of your extension available. It’s time to take a look at your extensions and make updates to them if necessary.

Additional Resources

Click here to read more information on packaging extensions for Magento 1.5 and later. Additionally, you can find more information about packaging extensions as well as most common mistakes for packaging, installing and upgrading your extensions by staying tuned to our Magento Connect FAQ. As always, I’m only an if you have any questions.

Rhonda

Packt Publishing is now accepting nominations for the 2011 Open Source Awards.

If you are not aware, The Open Source Awards is an annual online event held by Packt Publishing with the goal of distinguishing excellence among Open Source projects. The first step in this process is for the public to vote for nominees which began on August 1st and runs until September 9th.

Help us to further establish Magento as the best Open Source Business Application by nominating Magento. This category is specific for the type of Open Source web applications designed to support and help a company reach its commercial goals.

Also, by supporting your favorite Open Source project in the nominations stage you are automatically entered into a competition for the chance to win a fantastic Amazon Kindle! At the end of the nominations stage, a randomly chosen nominator will be drawn out of the hat.

Remember, the five Open Source projects with the most nominations will go through to the finals in each category. So what are you waiting for?

Go Go Magento!

Magento 1.4 Theming Cookbook is like a toolbox for building Magento themes. Thanks to its cookbook approach, the recipes found in this book can be applied in almost any Magento theme.

This book will help you to create a Magento theme using recipes in a step-by-step approach. Although you can dive into any individual recipe, the cookbook is organized in a way that will help beginners learn Magento theming by doing. More advanced users can refer to just the recipes that will be useful to them. You will learn how to add sliders, Cufon font replacements, social media, lightbox, and much more!

What you will learn from this book :

• Explore Magento theming, layouts, templates, inheritance, and all you need to work with Magento theming.
• Search, download, install, and modify existing themes, so you can start working with your Magento installation at once.
• Create your own theme from the ground up; add breadcrumbs, toplinks, a mini cart, a main menu, and all the items necessary to make a Magento theme.
• Use Cufon in your theme, create sliders, modify the lightbox, and add social media sharing icons.
• Create a simple module, a featured products module, and later modify it to create a most sold products module.
• Localize your themes and also make them multicurrency, and translate images and menus.
• Pack your theme and get ideas of where to sell it

Who this book is written for:
If you are a designer or programmer who wants to create excellent Magento themes, quickly and easily, this book is for you. No special knowledge of Magento or PHP is required, though some html and CSS experience will be helpful.

Learn more about the Magento 1.4 Theming Cookbook.

Does Crowd-sourcing Really Work?

Hey Folks,

It's a perfect day for Magento Answers! Each week we'd like to highlight a question from the community and listen to what you have to say. One of the questions asked by our Community that I'd like to crowd-source is this one: What is a clean Theme for a Store with limited Products? Is it our famous Blank Theme? No, I don't think so! But we want to hear from you.

So open your favorites and get the best out of it - post your answer in Magento Answers and help to find the best, clean Theme for a Store with limited Products.

Looking forward to your answers

Best, Rico

Join Atlanta-area Magento Commerce users, developers, designers and fans on September 6th, 2011 at 7:00 PM to discuss what we have done with Magento Commerce. Magento Meetup Atlanta links Magento folks for the sharing of eCommerce ideas and industry topics. It’s the local hot spot to organize, plan and collaborate on Magento projects.

This meeting will be kindly hosted by Fowara at their headquarters in Atlanta at 8975 Roswell Road, Atlanta, GA 30350. Meetup starts at 7 pm.

If you would like to share your Magento site and what you have done with it please contact with your website details and what you would like to share. The idea of this meetup is getting to know each other.

Don’t miss your chance to connect, network with and learn from other community Members in the Atlanta area. Space is limited to 50. Learn more: http://www.meetup.com/Southeast-Magento-Meetup/events/28704381/

4500 Extensions and Growing

Magento Connect has long been a successful key to the growth of the Magento Ecosystem. This is in no small part due to the creative developers and community members behind it. We are constantly seeing surprising growth in the size and the quality of the Magento Connect Marketplace.

Over the weekend, our gallery has grown to 4566 live extensions—check out the recently added extensions here. We’re very excited to see this growth and want nothing more than to see our community thrive. Thanks to all our developers for making our Magento Marketplace shine!

As we grow, we continually try to help our developers with tips and other information to make creating and getting your extensions approved faster—see our Magento Connect FAQ. Please keep it bookmarked, and stay up to date.

As always, if you have any questions, you know

Happy Developing!

Greetings Magento Community,

We’re often asked for advice by Magento developers on how they can better market their extensions on Magento Connect. One piece of advice I like to give is that they need to get creative to standout. We’ve seen great examples of our community being visually creative - see our Imagine Challenge. More recently, I stumbled across the following YouTube video.

Thanks to MageWorx—this video made me smile and reminds me how truly creative ya’ll can be.

Have something you’d like to share with us? and let us know. We look forward to seeing more of this.

Happy Marketing!

Hey, it’s my first week as a heavily contributing member and moderator for Magento Answers and I am very happy to join such a great project. So what’s going on now? Loads of questions! It’s nice to see the participation in our community with Magento Answers—which helps people to easily get their business started with Magento. Right now on Answers, we have over 500 discussions with over 6000 community members checking in, researching and discussing Magento Answers. That’s awesome!

We have a good stream of interesting questions too for example: What is the best way to update a Theme for a newer Version of Magento is a very good question and I’m interested to hear what you think could be the best way to do that?

Just a fast reminder: Please folks - don’t forget to topic your questions as it helps everybody to find and follow questions of interest. Make sure the topics are detailed enough to get good and valuable answers from all experts in that topic field.

For the last few days, I’ve been reading and answering really tight questions, which has forced me also to take a close look into front-end, back-end and also hundred and thousand lines of Magento code. We all learn from Magento Answers. I really appreciate the help of our community and love the success of Magento Answers!

See you @ Answers —Rico