This is the first of many screencasts we’ll be releasing with the Magento community site later this week. We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

... and it may take a while to download (given its ~20 MB size). Get some coffee and enjoy Magento’s first screencast.

My… This is something I have been waiting and searching for more than 10 years, now!

I would be ready to pay heavy $ for such a marvel of technology and… it’s FREE!
I guess Ihave done something good all this time
to deserve THIS gift at the end of my struggle for the perfect ecommerce solution!

What is really incredible is the sophistication of the attributes system.
I mean: nobody, even the costliest carts out there, has ever reached such a perfection.

Thank you, thank you, dear friends, for your work and for your vision.
eCommerce today has changed for good into its real v2.0

Joe.

Anyway, back to the waiting..

If it is so, it happen in a few hours. So lean back in your favourite easy chair.

@Zuhair: I mean no insult by my above referencing you as a younger member, but by the post its assumed, if I am wrong and you are not a younger member of the site, well.... then.... think before you type.... best way to say it i guess.

Also, Just because it is the 31st for you does not mean it is for magento. it is the 31st for me here in Australia..but for Varien it is still only the 30th.

Please consider what you wrote in your post.

Any plans to have one of these, or will it be an add-on (tinyMCE, etc) like os commerce and zen cart use?

Personally, I would like to see this part of Magento.

My guess is that Mr. Claus will be a little pissy this year from his lack of sleep and show up some time around dinner.

I have written a controller plugin that detects what language the users browser is in ( a good indication as to their preferred language) and defaults to that language if available. It also allows users to change the language anytime they like.

I also wish to create polish community for magento, but i think that everybody who is interested in this case wait for some messages from Varien about this domains.

Hi, unfortunately I’ve read the trade mark agreement after that I’ve purchased the domain. I’ve already written to magento to ask what’s best to do, since I’d like to create an italian community for magento users (my purpose is to promote magento in italy).

http://www.magentocommerce.com/license/

“You may not use the Magento trademark or any other mark associated with the Magento offering from our company in your domain name or URL.”

Product Groups look good I would like to see the configurable proucts, e.g.  with input fields for personalisable options, but will hold on questions until you demonstrate that/release code whichever is first.

Looks like Magento for my next generation Eshop…

(Can’t wait for the community to be opened up for us - i’m sure there’ll be a search form in there somewhere ;c)

http://www.magentocommerce.com/ecommerce-features/admin-panel/customer-groups

Something that jumped on my eyes. The Image Handling thing.

From my experience, most of the Users are not able to work with images. Consider to put a routine in your shop that enables auto generation of big, small and other images from an image.

Second, to me it looks that Images are not stored in a central Repository. Maybe it would be great to store the images central and generate the above named images.

Greets

Erich

http://www.magento.it

For example, if you added 10 Simple Product Rug Sizes to a group product called Persian Rugs, you might not want 11 search results when someone searched for Persian Rugs.

Great to hear it’ll work for each product.

The thumbnail issue hopefully is a high priority as users will tire of having to manually create thumbnails.

Take a look at how etsy.com handles images. The user uploads 1x 1000x1000 image and the thumbnails are all created for you.

Keep up the good work.

The magento team has already mentioned that the “thumbnail-on-the-fly” option will be available in the future. As of now, if you want some way to create automatic thumbnails I’d suggest looking into a 3rd party Script (java/ajax/php) that will create thumbs for you. Was the source is release I’ll try to post something useful as soon as I can take a look at the code.

I’m sure other people will be doing the same.

In any case. DO NOT let that discourage you or your team, you guys are tackling a ton of issues at once that took other solutions (oscommerce, zencart) YEARS to get fully functional.

Hats off to you guys. Lets crank this out.

The release is scheduled to be out sometim between now and Aug 31. And I could be wrong, but judging from what I’ve been reading I think Google Checkout WILL Be supported, but not completely stable in Beta 1.

Again, Magento isn’t ready for production, so I’d suggest you keep your current OScommerce Installation until the team can work out the issues.

We’re just BETA testers, working out the kinks at this point.

Thanks for the update. Does this mean that Batch Import/Export should not be expected as fully functional in Beta 1, or should we not expect it functional as far as it working with Grouped Products.

Let me know your thoughts.

Yoav would probably be able to give you more details about this, but I believe grouped products would still be customizable individually because they are allowed to be purchased individually.

However, configurable products are different than single products (in the screencast they only added single products to a group), I’m not sure if configurable products are able to be included in a product group at this time. If it is, I would imagine that each product can be customized either individually or as a group. I wouldn’t imagine not giving the shopper a choice at all though.

There may also be some confusion in the future regarding product “bundles” which can only be purchased together, not individually. I’m sure there will be a screencast that will explain that concept though.

Regarding the newsletter subscription, that is for official newsletters not notification of new blog posts. The last newsletter was sent on July 12th according to my records. For new blog posts, subscribe to the RSS feed or check back often.

A couple of comments/questions:

- Say one of the products you want to group has one or more selectable attributes, such as color.  Will the customer have the option to select the color he/she wants within the grouped product, or will it be up to the administrator to pick one ahead of time?

- I agree with Roman and others: the webcasts are a really good idea, please keep them coming.  They will save loads of time and effort when training up personnel with administrative privileges of some kind.

- There seems to be a problem with your newsletter subscription.  I signed up back in July when the new Magento site came out, and I received a couple of emails about new posts and whatnot.  Then all of a sudden I stopped receiving emails (and no, they are not getting caught by my spam filter).  I tried signing up again once or twice since then, to no avail…

Sounds good. Glad to see you all have a clear-cut game plan.  Nice to meet you as well.

Note: I can’t stress enough the importance of the Bug/Issue Roadmap. This will really help developers see a snapshot of what areas need attention. I’d hate for 80% of the community to be working on making the UI “pretty” with only a few devoted towards hammering out the back-end bugs (like Payment processing).  Roy mentioned that a Bug System will be up later after the release, so that sounds good. But Please make that a concern. I’m sure other developers know how important this is!

Good Luck man! Go Go Magento.

- I’ll stop blowing up your Blog with comments now.

The code still needs packaged, documentation written, screencasts recorded, community site polished up, demo storefront and backend ready to roll, etc. So that’s the focus of this week. We’re almost there!

I see, and Trust me I KNOW it’s a huge task, especially with Payment Gateways.  I know you guys are on the ball, you have my faith.

As far as the development and beta testing this, which gateway needs the most development?  To date, which is the most stable with the current framework? I know Google checkout is very popular now, but Authorize.net may be easier to integrate, or possibly PayFlow. My point is I think as much as the Magento team would like to universally support ALL gateways, it may be necessary to put emphasis on the most stable solution, so developers can work around it and then further support the others. 

Please provide more details. Look forward to helping to cause.

My one main concern, and I’m sure it’s something someone will fix pretty quickly, is being able to have several pictures per product page.

The items we’re selling need all of those details to close the sale, and we have about 6 pictures per product to cover every angle.

Will it at all be possible with beta1 to manually use say 6 images, even if not through the admin?

Obviously the team cannot test every single path that a user may take through the site/ordering process. Also, because of time restrictions this section of the application hasn’t been able to be fully tested. That’s really where the beta testers are needed.

As we cannot say enough, this is a beta for testing purposes. It will have holes, bugs, security issues, etc. That’s a given. There is still much work to be done in every facet of the system, including payment processing. This is the the start of something great. Just remember: it took Thomas Edison 14 months to create the first practical lightbulb.

Can you elaborate a bit on which areas of focus the magento team is still developing? Specifically, How functional/stable is the Payment/Processing in the ability to process orders via Google Checkout, Payflow Pro etc. Is there work still to be done in that area?

I ask becomes I think ultimately the biggest issues for end-users will be “can I collect & process orders”. While many will spend time tweaking and fixing the UI, I think a primary area of concern will be within the Payment process. How is this coming?

@Nick: completelty agree to your lastest sentence

@Fabrizio
I don’t think it would be to hard to add a 3rd party script to automatically create your Thumbnails, I’ll be looking into this and I’ll post what I find on the community site.

@Robert
Development wise… Making Magento Open-Source gives it near unlimited potential if you think about it? I thnk I follow what Roy was talking about in his initial video.  You COULD make magento commercial, and solely rely on the Magento team to improve upon it and keep it in shape. I’m sure they would do a good job judging thus far. 

OR, you make the source open code and allow it to grow exponentially by way of the thousands of developers and end-users; quicker, faster, and more respected in community since the greater good is more in focus than Just a the money. The money is there in either scenario. But Trust me, there’s a reason why HUGE projects like Digg, Facebook,and Flickr have their recently made their source code open....

As Fabrizio sad. Install some library to make thumbs and watermark automoatic

What is this SKU?

Re the screencast, I found the background music a little distracting sometimes - I’d fade it down a bit or only have it at the beginning in the intro.

cheers!

All I can say is wow! With all of the hard work varien has put into this why is it free??? It boggles the mind!

Now my thoughts…

First of all the screencast idea is great, very useful too for end users to get familiar.  The Grouped Products feature does seem to be very useful, and intuitive in setting it up.

My only immediate question is will it work along with the Excel Import/Export of products? For end users with catalogs of 100-200+ Products, The ability to add products via a .csv/.xls Spreadsheets really helps manage the store. My clients enjoy this feature the most because they can upload many products at once, and it helps because usually new products come in in groups, rather than individually.  Will you be able to add grouped products via the spreadsheet? By way of individual attribute columns?

Other than that I like the Idea. I’d like to possibly see if customers/visitors can search for these “Grouped Product” sets via the Layered Navigation Filters as well.

Just a thought.  But overall it looks good. The attribute system, and the ability to add Up-sell/cross sell and multiple images via the NEW Product Screen is great. That part looked awesome.

Can’t wait to really see it in action.