Magento

We’ve had a great week since releasing the Magento Preview to the world roughly 10 days ago. The response has been overwhelming and the feedback has been great. The numbers speak for themselves, with over 7,000 downloads and 1100+ registered users posting 2500+ messages in this period. The excitement and passion for the product is truly remarkable. We’d like to thank the wonderful community for accepting Magento so warmly.

We’ll post periodic updates on the blog (such as this), so subscribe to the RSS feed to stay in the loop.

Development

• A light installation of Magento will be available through the SVN in the next couple of days.
• The translation process will be finalized this week and instructions on how to get started will be posted.
• Paypal implementation is expected to be finalized (Express Checkout and Paypal Direct).
• The team is currently reviewing the project roadmap and planning future development cycles and releases. Information about future releases will be posted in the coming weeks.

Community Site

• 9 new screencasts are now online, including: Landing Pages, Product Comparisons, Related Products, Configurable Products, Search, Tags, Tier Pricing, Upsells, and Grouped Products. If you’d like us to produce a screencast on a topic that we have not covered before, please let us know .
• International forums are up and running. The German forum has been especially active with over 200 posts.
• Content on the Wiki has been expanding. We recommend you check out the Designing for Magento article if you wish to learn about Magento’s template structure. We also started compiling a comprehensive list of International eCommerce Regulations. If you are an international eCommerce merchant, please feel free to contribute.

The community site will continue to expand in the next few weeks with a number of large scale projects scheduled. As always, if you have any ideas or would like to suggest a feature, please let us know .

Finally, we’d like to give you a breakdown of the events that took place the night before Magento’s launch, as written by Udi Shamay (a senior project manager here at Varien).

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You had to be there. I mean here, at Varien, hours before Magento went from late night conversations and scribbled ideas to our own software application. The task of meeting the deadline wasn’t easy as we promised to strike by the end of August and somewhere in the world the clock was moving fast towards September 1st . So here’s a recap of the most important day and night in Varien’s history:

August 30th 7:00: Arrive at work prepared for a very long day
August 30th 10:00: Team meeting and final tasks handed out. Coffee cup #1
August 30th 13:00: QA team finalizes testing and we’re ready to package the product.
August 30th 15:00: Installation Wizard ready for testing. Coffee cup #2 and 3 just for quenching the thirst.
August 30th 17:00: We’re all still here. People making calls to loved ones ’don’t wait up’.
August 30th 20:00: Installer issues. Need to repackage the product.
August 30th 23:00: Still all here. Waiting for the installer to be completed. Coffee cup #4 is consumed.
August 31st 2:00: Announcement by core dev team that this is it. Turns out to be a False Alarm. Coffee cups 5 & 6 are drank simultaneously.
August 31st 4:00: INTERNET DOWN. This is not a drill. Troops prepare to relocate HQ.
August 31st 4:30: The internet Gods take mercy and internet is back up.
August 31st 6:00: Final testing. Community is restless. Number of Speculative Comments on blog are overwhelming. Out of Coffee - switching to Tea.
August 31st 7:00: Finally ready for launch. Files are being uploaded to the server as the team watches.
August 31st 8:00: Flip the Switch. Magento is live. Team stays to witness first reactions from the community.
August 31st 11:00: No big issues reported. 28 hrs later we call it a day.