Magento

It’s that time again! A new version of magento is out and about – terrorizing your neighborhood! It’s called 1.4.1.1 – not as catchy as the “beast of Bodmin moor” but what are you gonna do?

Some of the major changes in this one you can find here.

But from a quick skim through of the release notes it seems there are a lot of fixes based around the stock status, quantity and payment methods. There’s always a good number of fixes and improvements in every release note, it’s surprising the thing works as it is!

Is this another spit and polish or have they really capped off Magento’s Oil Leaks?

What I would like to see soon is a better method of backing up the data for magento – perhaps a built in folder duplicator that will create and entire backup – DB and all – every time you run your mage_all_latest.

All I know is – I’m having trouble upgrading from 1.4.0.1…let’s see if they fix that in 1.4.1.2…

Thanks for checking out our magento blog here at ecommerce website design – home of the magento fox!

At Ecommerce Web Design, we’re big fans of using Wordpress as blogging software which can be installed alongside Magento seamlessly, and provide a clean, open-source blogging solution. It’s free, easy to install, accessible and literally bursting with plugins.

However if you want another solution which integrates into the same backend as the Magento one, I’d recommend the Aheadworks Free Blog extension. It comes with large amounts of customisation, SEO-friendly links and pretty much all the standard features that you’d find with Wordpress – you can even enable RSS feeds with it too. There’s categories, comments, users and a nice TinyMCE editor to write your post with.

Aheadworks make a great range of quality extensions, most of which they sell for reasonable prices. The best thing about the Magento Blog is that it’s completely free to download and use – I guess it would have to be to compete with Wordpress.

So which one would I recommend? Well, I do think that Wordpress is not only the best blogging tool on the Internet, but it’s also possibly one of the best CMS systems available anywhere. This very blog is written in Wordpress and the possibilities are endless. However if you’re after a simple, no-fuss and manageable solution and want to keep everything in one place, I would absolutely put forward the Aheadworks solution. But Wordpress will always be king I’m sure…

As an early advocate of Web 2.0, nothing please me more than seeing mashups happening across the Internet on a grand scale. So when I saw an official Magento Blog post containing the words Magento and Skype, I was instantly very interested. Well, this isn’t a mashup. The bottom line is that Skype now use Magento. I’m fairly confident that Magento would also use Skype, but I’ll leave that for one of their developers to confirm as we wait holding our breath…

The Skype shop is now using Magento as its primary e-commerce platform for selling it’s telecom-related products. It appears as though they are using an in-depth structure of websites and stores to make each one applicable to the country that the person is browsing from. The design has also been nicely customised in a very simple but effective, clean style. There’s even the nice addition of a bestsellers section at the top of the categories page.

It gets even more advanced as you try to buy a product it sends you to another website, with a highly-customised JQuery checkout – all on one page only. I think stores like this are probably only suited to company’s like Skype because it’s a very one-off event that a customer would need to buy equipment like this. It’s not a place you come back to shop on a regular basis. You get what you need and leave.

All this Skype talk got me thinking about how Skype could be integrated into Magento to create a nice online help feature. I know the Skype embed buttons are available  for anyone to use, but having it integrated more seamlessly would be a nice feature imho. I’m sure Skype could have a big part to play in today’s ecommerce web design, let’s hold out for the future!

Here at ecommerce website design we are starting to piece together the more useful blogs that we have on our magento blog and are determined to create easily installable magento extensions.

Ones that we currently plan to turn into extensions are the following:

• Our Free Samples solution
• Our Special Offers block (remade with magento friendly JQuery)
• Quick Discreet Navigation (NEW)
• JQuery Friendly Slider
• Category Listing with Lowest Item Price for homepage
• SEO Improvements Pack – Version 1
• Quick Contact Form with Prefill
• Login/Logout switchable button

These are just the features that we have come up with at the moment that we feel should be converted into extensions rather than hacks. If you think of any more then please let us know by commenting on our blog.

Myself (Rob), Adam and our new blogger Luci will continue to strive and strain to work with magento and fiddle with it as much as humanly possible. When we come up with our hacks we will eventually run them as extensions for everybody to enjoy!

Only one more thing to mention. Under duress we are probably going to roll out our extensions under the guise of Magento Fox. It was his decision and with those teeth we really didn’t want to argue with him…

Sometimes at Ecommerce Web Design, there’s nothing that quite motivates you like an early morning cake…

In a tribute to Magento, and the Hex Montage that accompanied all that ‘Core Element’ stuff that Magento were feeding into peopl’s minds – this hexagonal chocolate cake will feed your stomach. The cake proudly displays the Magento logo, however suffice to say it didn’t last very long… well, it was on my desk! You can’t leave stuff like that lying around with that Magento Fox about.

MAGENTO CAKE – NOT AVAILABLE IN STORES

Tomorrow, more Magento tips and tutorials from the Magento Blog.