Magento

In the very near future we’ll be releasing the design beta of our new Magento Connect marketplace.  This new design isn’t the “Magento Connect 2.0” update you’ve been hearing about, but rather a refreshed design that will prepare the way for some of the larger changes ahead.  That being said, we’ve made a couple functional upgrades that will make Magento Connect a better experience for our users, and over the next week, I’ll be blogging about these updates so that our developers can prepare for them before they go live. 

The first major update I’d like to announce is to our extension categories.  Previously, the amount of categories wasn’t vast enough to cover the breadth of products that our community was offering, and to make things more confusing, there was no cap on the amount of categories an extension could be listed within.  This resulted in a very poor experience, and now that we seeing so many new extensions on our marketplace, it is a perfect time introduce two updates in this area.  So without further delay.....

Two-Category Limit for Extensions
First, we’re placing a cap on the number of categories an extension can be listed in.  From now on, extensions can only be associated to two —two.  This will make it much easier for merchants find extensions

New Categories
Second, we’re introducing a new suite of categories (listed below).  When the new design goes live, developers will be able to login to their account and re-categorize their extensions.  We’re also working on a few contingency plans for developers who may not immediately be able to make this update.

Here are the new categories:

* Administration
* Advertising & Marketing
* Analytics
* Automation
* Billing & Invoicing
* Catalog
* Checkout
* Content Management
* Customer Service
* Data
* Design & Themes
* Gifting
* Integration
* Internationalization & Localization
* Merchandizing
* Migration tools
* Mobile
* Optimization
* Other
* Payments & Gateways
* Performance
* Personalization
* Pricing & Promotion
* Search
* SEO
* Shipping
* Shopping Cart
* Widgets

If you have any feedback or suggestions, be sure to post in the comments below.  We’re very open to your feedback.  I’ll have some more exciting updates to announce in the days & weeks ahead, and will also make a few announcements at our Magento Developer’s event next month.