Author Archive

Magento Scalability and Performance

Performance and scalability are hot topics for any enterprise application, including the new Magento Enterprise package. Many clients are usually impressed with the features and extensibility of Magento, but there is a worry in the background if the platform can scale to many thousands of orders per day or huge catalogs. There are two concerns: first, everybody wants to have the shortest loading time possible, which is what we mean by performance. Amazon and Google did some research on this, and found that a hundred milliseconds of delay can already reduce conversion rates. Performance … Full Story

Ten great ecommerce tips for Magento

Practical eCommerce – the leader in Ecommerce news – asks industry insiders each month to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce company succeed. Here’s what ten of them had to say for the July 2009 installment. Full Story

Add Static Block content in template

Normally you would need to add some lines of code in the XML layout files to be able to include a static block from the CMS-system in the Magento Backend, but using this code in the template will automatically fetch the content from the static block: <?php echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock(‘cms/block’)->setBlockId(‘your_cms_block_identifier’)->toHtml() ?> Full Story

Magento and Drupal

We just noticed that a Maxime Topolov had released an integration between Magento and Drupal. The extension-description promise a full integration of both the catalog and orders, everything being possible to manage from the Drupal Admin interface. We currently dont have any Drupal installations up running but as we are looking at designing Drupal themes as well as our Magento themes this extension might be very interesting, so we’ll test this one the coming week. If anyone else have tried it or will be trying it we’d be more than happy to hear your … Full Story

Varien releases the Official Magento User Guide Book

Varien today released the official Magento User Guide Book. We’ve had the abilitity to take a short sneak preview of the book and it looks like a winner to the thousands of Magento-users who has now started working on Magento as their primary ecommerce tool. We love that there’s finally a book about the general usage of Magento and not only the backend/development-part as the real user-masses are the daily users working with sales and products in Magento. Read more and purchase through Varien from this link: http://www.magentocommerce.com/support/magento-user-guide-book Full Story

Magento Book: Beginner’s Guide

Packt Publishing, specialized in books around opensource-solutions, released their first “Beginner’s Guide”-book about Magento. This book will provide you with step-by-step instructions for installing, configuring, and using Magento to run your own e-commerce site. The author will set up an example store in the book with enough information to adapt the instructions according to your needs. This book is for anyone who wants to create an online store using Magento. If you are a non-technical person and are discouraged by the complexity of this powerful e-commerce application, this book is ideal for you. Full Story

Magento Enterprise

Varien released its Enterprise Edition a month ago and here are some thoughts about the release. With over 750k downloads of the community-version and 85k community members Varien knew that many of their users would be interested in a paid Enterprise-version, and after a few months of hard work and countless feedback from the community and their partners Varien released the first Enterprise-version April 15th. Full Story

Magento and Joomla

Joomla, being one of the most popular CMS-systems out there, includes an integration with Virtuemart, a popular ecommerce solution. However, what if you want to use Joomla together with Magento? Then MageBridge is the key! Full Story

WordPress and Magento

With the latest release of Magento 1.3, there really is no escaping the fact that Magento is the number one software for your eCommerce site. With it’s flexibility and scalability there is very little you can’t get Magento to do in an eCommerce environment. Granted, the CMS options could be and perhaps should be a bit more flexible compared to the rest, but they do the trick. There only one thing Magento can’t do and that is blog. Where Magento is becoming the dominant software for eCommerce websites, is WordPress already the most popular … Full Story