On the morning of June 6th, Magento Inc announced that it had had reached an agreement to be acquired by eBay Inc. The pending acquisition – scheduled to close in the 3rd quarter of 2011 – will enable Magento to accelerate our growth and extend our reach as part of eBay Inc.’s X.commerce platform.

eBay is evolving to become a strategic commerce partner focused on delivering new ways for merchants of all sizes to drive innovation. As a centerpiece of this strategy, they are building a global, open commerce platform that leverages the worldwide developer community. And Magento will be at the core of this new, open commerce platform, called “X.Commerce.”

Partnering since 2010

Magento and eBay have a bit of a history together already. In March 2010, eBay became their first outside investor. Over the past year, eBay has gotten to know the platform, the culture, and the community. They have experienced the passion of the Magento ecosystem, and they are eager to harness the power of this ecosystem to create the next generation of eCommerce innovation.

Learn more

• Read the FAQ about the acquision
• eBay’s statement

Video from CEO Roy Rubin

Video from the CEO at eBay

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The major updates includes enhancements on payment methods, better call center functionality both for the frontend- and backend.

The new release also includes an alternative media storage like a CDN.

The Magento Webservice APIs for the shopping cart and gift messages is also included, together with fixing of several security vulnerabilities.

1. Find your font. A good resource of free fonts is www.dafont.com, however make sure the font you are about to use has an EULA that fits your needs.
2. Go to the Cufon site and follow the instructions on how to upload your font and get the generated font.js file. Also download the cufon-yui.js script.
3. Place all the .js files in a new directory in /js/cufon.
4. Open your template’s page.xml file and add the below code in its head section:
   <action method="addJs"><script>cufon/cufon-yui.js</script></action>
<action method="addJs"><script>cufon/YourFontFile.font.js</script></action>
5. Now open your template’s head.phtml file and add the following code at the very end of it:
   <script type="text/javascript">Cufon.replace('h1, h2');</script>

You’re done. Your h1 and h2 tags are now using your custom font.

You can also target spesific CSS classes by adding the following script tag:

Now in its fifth year, Meet Magento is one of the largest and exciting eCommerce events in Europe and an ideal meeting place for eCommerce merchants, business leaders and developers.

Magento CEO Roy Rubin will hold a keynote at the conference.

Click here for more details and tickets.

To adjust this setting open up app/code/core/Mage/Media/Model/File/Image.php and go to around line #168. There, modify the number 80 in line $result = imagejpeg($object->getTmpImage(), $object->getFilePath(true), 80); to a higher number. Note that this is a core hack and will most likely be overwritten during a full Magento upgrade.

• Added ability to use static URLs for media in WYSIWYG or image browser.
• Added ability to enable parsing store, skin and media directives on catalog frontend.
• URL rewrites history: ability to auto-generate custom rewrite with redirect from old to new URL when changing product URL-key.
• Added ability to exclude a category from navigation menu
• Various improvements in system configuration UI
• Introduced ability to make actual configuration structure to be independent on the system.xml structure
• Added “Only X left” inventory feature
• Implemented Centinel functionality in iphone theme
• Upgraded TinyMCE to v.3.3.2
• Improved PayPal integration, includes:
  * Recurring payment profiles entity and purchasing of “subscription” products. In checkout they are treated as “nominal” items.
  * Billing agreements * “Pending Review” order state, “Pending Review” and “Suspected Fraud” order statuses and logic related with this. Triggers by PayPal IPR, FMF and Unilateral payments.
  * Functionality of transactions listing/searching and fetching from gateway
  * Fetching PayPal settlement reports via SFTP
  * Various improvements of PayPal integration on the frontend and admin UI
• Added notice about creating offline creditmemo from order view page.
• Added getter for recurring payment methods in payment helper.
• Implemented abstract block ability to have arbitrary groups of child blocks and a method that returns such a group.
• Implemented a method that fetches data from child block by specified alias.
• Implemented ability to specify “sort_order” instead of “before” and “after” in the totals declaration.
• All nominal totals declaration utilize “sort_order”
• Added getter for specified object data by key in core/template block: method getObjectData()
• Defined payment methods grouping, implemented getter for payment method list (with option to group them).
• Added ability to render grouped options in the “select” grid filter.
• Moneybookers: utilized the payment methods grouping for all its methods; removed redundant “translate” attribute in the methods definition in config.
• Utilized payment methods grouping for PayPal peyment methods.
• Added more verbosity to PayPal NVP and IPN debugging
• Changes Sales module database structure changed from EAV into flat tables
• Product custom URL rewrites redirect to SEF URL, rather than to catalog/product/view/id/
• Reimplemented frontend top menu rendering logic (cross-browser and usability improvements)
• Reviewed logic of the sales reports: Orders, Tax, Invoiced, Shipping, Refunds, Coupons
• Reimplemented bestsellers report
• Implemented 3D Secure validation for Maestro International and JCB cards
• Changed Shopping cart methods output (top + bottom): removed
• Moved the Payflow Pro payment method to PayPal module
• Refactored sales/service_quote model: instead of submit() method the submitAll() should be used. It can submit nominal items separately from the order. The methods for submitting nominal items and order separately – are available as well.
• Refactored onepage checkout model to use the new method sales/service_quote::submitAll(), added recurring profiles and billing agreements passing through the process until the success page
• Utilized child blocks grouping to improve flexibility of rendering additional information in catalog/product/view template.
• The group is called “detailed_info”; any block from layout may insert itself to this group.
• Removed redundant wrappers hard-coded into some catalog templates.
• Template of parent block is responsible for wrapping. Refactored onepage checkout success block and template: simplified fetching related checkout information, added ability to render billing agreement and recurring profiles that might be created with the payment placement.

The Magento Mobile application is currently available for Apple iPhone only, but will be made available for other platforms like Android and Maemo later this year.

Varien will license the application on a per month basis. More details on prices will be published as soon as we get to know it.

For more info check out the productpage over at Varien:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/mobile

The new Professional Edition is based upon Magento Enterprise Edition and includes some of the most-wanted features from the Enterprise Edition including Gift Cards, Customer Credits and the Reward Point System. The Magento Professional Edition also includes a much more robust foundation as its core is based upon the Enterprise source.

To learn more and purchase Magento Professional Edition please visit Silverthemes.com.