Magento

Please post your questions to the Magento Team here on any topic relating to the product and community.

We’ll select a number of questions to answers and record a video with key players from the team.

UPDATE: We prefer questions that are general in nature about the product/commmunity/future/competition etc. Specific Magento questions (How Do I) will be difficult to answer through a video.

UPDATE 2 - Video by the Magento Team is now online - http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/video-you-ask-we-answer/. Please do not sumit any further questions. We will do this again soon.

+ + + + + + + + Q: Are there Plans for integration of Postgresql to work with Magento??

Q: When will Magento support pre-orders, so that a customer can add a “pre-order” item to their cart, and have that portion of their order not charged to their credit card until the item is in stock (to comply with laws about this)?

Q: When will Varien exhibit their confidence in Magento and launch a project with one of their clients using Magento 1.1.2?

Q: The new version 1.1.1 with virtual product is good but in the future do you plan to ad a system which allow the final users to download the virtual product with an access code directly after finishing the checkout?

Q: If the development of another ecommerce system were to one-up Magento, what would it offer? In other words, what are Magento’s current weaknesses? How do you see resolving those in the future?

Q: You are doing a great job! However, especially lately, it has been a number of posts on the forum from users that would like to see the Magento Team more active posting answers on the Forum. Obviously you are the No. 1 Source for Magento Information. Is this something that can be expected (now or later), or does the Varien business model or other concerns prohibit that. I believe it would be good to communicate what is to be expected and why. Thanks! (norbolig)

Q: Do you still plan to add a WYSIWYG editor as indicated earlier (such as Tiny MCE)?

Q: What are the best / largest examples of live stores using Magento? How many products do they have, how many orders per week, etc?

Q: How can I handle coupon code on Magento default theme ?

+ Q: What are your plans regarding documentation, in regards to in-code documentation (PHPDoc), external documentation (manuals, reference pages, etc), and additional books in the works? (ylibrach)

Q: What do you think about a documentation of the Magento database structure; that would make the work for external developers simpler.

Q: Are there plans to extend the API to allow order creation, and until that moment, could you explain how to create one in code?

Q: When do you plan to stop adding new features and begin to more greatly stabilize the code, thus resulting in a very stable version?

+ + Q: Would it be possible to give the community more of a voice in determining the direction of current Magento development, perhaps by allowing voting on feature requests and/or defects in the bug (issue) tracker? For example, the community might then vote the addition of WYSIWYG editing higher than an iPhone theme which could be taken into consideration for the next release. (haz)

Q: I think its generally fair to say that upgrading from version 1.0.x to 1.1.x has been traumatic and challenging for many users (myself included), e.g. the forum entry describes the problems, Moving to 1.1.1… Does Every Upgrade Have To Be This Painful? Developer Gripes & Hopes For The Future. What can Magento do to answer the criticisms of the upgrade process, and looking forward :- to improve it and involve the community further to minimize the number of issues when upgrading?

Q: Would it be possible to give the community an upgrade database script from 1.0 to 1.1. So if I have an existing 1.0 site I could install a clean 1.1 and upgrade only the database?

Q: Why you use an EAV database architecture if you are changing the structure in every minor upgrade ?

+ Q: I will try to make it simple. You meant for Magento to be available for free, but to derive income from other services. As, I understand, if you will not get enough income from it, you may stop any further development. What are the chances it can happen? (KonstantinDK)

Q: Magento is developed for mod_php. This gives file permission errors each time you upgrade or install extensions if your server has PHP installed as a CGI. Are you planning on changing/fixing that?

Q: What is Drag n’ Drop design mode; is it as exciting as it sounds and when will it be launched?

Q: My clients are different companies that sell the same products but at different prices. Can I sell them a subscription to a Magento solution in which I would have one website charged with all the products and would create a different store for each of my clients?

Q: What are the reasons to making Magento not multi-vendor capable? i.e. different backend user with their own sales and products?

[*Updated*]Q: A lot of people launched their project on the 1.1 release, and a lot of questions about CMS and integration are issued lately. As I understand it, the Magento Team doesn’t plan to upgrade the CMS features for a while. It’s pretty logical, but can we hope for more documentation soon or/and help from the Magento Team on the forum (seems like they are less available lately ?) It sometimes take days to figure out some pretty dumb thing like the upload of a file, could we hope for a closer look and help from Magento Team on shared issues. (And what about sticking an FAQ post resuming most known issues like “I don’t see my categories on the front page”).

- Q: How about adding something like zoomii.com’s interface to Magento?

Q: Hi, as far as I understand, all shopping cart/eCommerce solutions I see are full featured PHP driven web sites. This means that all the pages the user interacts with, are server generated, and thus, the experience, is tied to the magento framework/workflow. I’d like to integrate bits and pieces of eCommerce/shopping cart in my existing website. Effectively, I’d like to have:

1) on a product information page, a “buy now/add to cart” button that adds to a cart 2) on every page, a view cart/checkout option (and possibly a one-line remainder of the number of items in the cart) 3) on a checkout page, with additional content already in place, having the magento “checkout” block integrated in the page (and not the entire page generated from Magento).

Furthermore, I can’t find the following information in any place. I’d like to use Magento to permit users to add to the cart products as they browse the website (see above). Then, when they want to checkout, they are presented the shopping cart content. Since these are intangible goods (download files), I’d like to prevent any “shipping” method/price to display. Also, since these products are paid later on-use, I’d like to display a price associated with a product, but skip any “payment” step in the checkout process, and have the user provided a list of download links directly (one link per-product), or better, having the server zip all the files in a per-checkout process and offer a single .zip file for all the downloadable files. Is this possible with Magento?

In addition, does Magento work when the user has Javascript disabled?

Q : Do you plan to set up a Magento Certification Program ? if yes, What kind and when ? (kohril)

Q : A major part of the advantages of an open-source approach to programming is the developers’ assistance in creating a thriving community by answering user questions and general knowledge sharing. I (and many others) have been disappointed by the lack of participation in the forums by Varien employees. Are you planning to correct this in the near future?

Q: The current Magento development process is opaque to the community - does Varien have any plans to address this? Some suggestions for more transparency are to release detailed changelogs for each version, open up access to any internal bug tracker for use by developers and the community, allow (read-only) access to the internal source control system, allow community developers to submit patches for inclusion in the Magento trunk and to release more developer documentation.

Q: Need step by step instructions for image imports and what happens behind the scenes. Have yet to get the csv or xml paths to work or the media import.

+ + Q: Is there a timeframe for affiliate tracking? What will the affiliate tracking be like?

Q: Can you please be more specific about the OSL licence and Magento ? What can we do ? What can’t we do ?

Q: Magento’s use of the Zend directory/class name conventions feels excessive; the size of the source tree is prohibitive for learning the system, and the level of inheritance and use of generated methods compounds the problem. Is a simplification of the code base something Varien has considered?

Q: The EAV database structure makes Magento’s data model very frustrating to modify (and, notably, to redeploy when multiple development, staging and production environments are involved). Is moving away from EAV a possibility?

Q: Using standard debugging tools that produce stack traces is prohibitively difficult with Magento; such traces exceed 20 MB in most cases. To compound this, Magento will often fail silently even when PHP‘s error reporting is set to full tilt. The error logging is also sparse and often missing, and many ‘catch’ blocks in the code simply return false rather than logging or outputting their associated exceptions. Is there any plan for better internal error reporting in Magento?

Q: Magento’s resource consumption often requires modification of the PHP configuration just for standard operations like importing sets of data. What does Varien plan to do to make this software usable on configurations such as shared hosting where users simply do not have this option?

Q: Magento’s issue tracking would be far more useful to the community with more developer feedback on bug fixes, particularly when statuses are changed with no indication of the actual resolution or reasoning. Will this be addressed?

Q: The code base is often obviously duplicitous – for example, several classes show comments from the wrong file, indicating they used other classes as templates but the comments were never changed. There are also entire methods which are simply commented out in the standard distribution. Is there any plan to clean up the code?

Q: Will it be possible in the future to add default unit types (i.e. inches, cm,...) to certain attributes, so that it won’t be necessary to type the unit types into each attribute field of each product. This would give the possibility to use i.e. the lenght of an article for further calculations directly from the attribute field.

Qi have created a custom module to uplaod video i am unable to uplaod video physicaly nthing is coming up under $_FILES i got a form elements on a file named form.php but when i am tryng to add enctype=mulitpart/form data its not working hey any body has any solution for this

Q: Are you planning to extend the CMS system in any way in the near future? Having worked with this thing a lot, I am missing subpages, folding, quick-(de)activation, Copy/Duplicate, Fast-StoreView-Changing, Auto-URLs from Page Title (or from parent node if nested) and some other vital things a CMS should have. I realize that Magento isn’t going to be the next Typo3, but a little more Functionality in this area would make the life much easier.

Que : How a user came to know that he has accounted a coupon code in magento

Q: Will there be more language support? (e.g. translate shipping or payment methods)

Q: When will emails work correctly for everyone? Simple scripts work perfectly fine with emails but your script does not. Will this be fixed for us soon so we can start using your cart?