MagJournal

Silverthemes releases new Magento theme

clearblue_productpage_magiczoom

Silverthemes.com, a Premium Magento Themes company, yesterday released their latest Magento ClearBlue theme.

ClearBlue is focused on a clear blue line going through the whole theme. The design is made for easy customization of both colors and the overall style.

The ClearBlue theme is bundled with:
- Vertical Category menu (Walmart style)
- MagicZoom Plus product-image magnifier
- SimpleBoard magento widget

These popular Magento addons are sold at almost $200 when purchased separately. The theme supports both 3-, 4- and 5-column category-pages – as well as the standard 1-column-, 2-column, (left+right)- and 3-column layout of the store.

The ClearBlue-theme does not have dropdown in the horisontal category menu. This is by purpose as most store-owners want their customers to click through the main category to see special offers etc before navigating to the bottom sub-category.

>> Click here for full demo of template

Official Magento User Guide Book released

The Magento User Guide provides the site administrator with detailed instructions addressing the platform’s innumerable functions. From setting up your store to managing your products, pages and promotions to generating detailed reports, the User Guide empowers our ever-widening customer to utilize the platform for all of its vast capacity. Serving as a handy problem solving solution as well as a practical step by step guide, the User Guide is sure to become a cost-effective partner in your Magento store implementation.

The e-book version cost $24,95 while the printed version cost $32,95.

For more details and a sneak preview of the content visit Magento’s official website:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/support/magento-user-guide-book

We hope to be able to review the book in more details within a few weeks time.

Magento reaches 1 million downloads (and counting)

A major milestone has been reached as Magento surpasses the 1,000,000 million download count. Varien’s CEO Roy Rubin says he is extremely grateful to the community, the partners and the eCommerce world that embraced Magento so warmly over the past 16 months the stable release has been out.

Top 3 Great Magento Themes

We’ve seen lots of magento themes coming up since the very first official release of Magento in early 2008. Some of these themes are really great, while most of them really lacks the premium content needed for a professional store. Now and then we pick the best Magento themes around. In this first post we’ve picked three great themes from Silverthemes.com, one of the “seniors” in this market.

1. Magento Tubetheme

The TubeTheme by Silverthemes is really a great theme. The design is very clean, inspired by YouTube. The functionality includes both 3-, 4- and 5-column product pages, administration of footer-content in Magento Admin, good SEO although not 100% yet, bordered buttons with CSS3 (works great in Firefox 3.x). The theme also includes lots of great additional addons to make the store perfect.

2. Fashion theme

The Magento Fashion theme by Silverthemes is a dark theme, with strong colors which is perfect for clothes stores and any kind of fashion stores. The Static Blocks can be used to add custom information in the header (links, etc). Plus for very easy installation instructions.

3. Magento Megastore theme

The Megastore theme is a perfect magento theme for any large scale Magento-store with thousands of products in its catalog. The theme includes all the great optional functionality like product popup, catalog dropdown, magiczoom like all the other themes from Silverthemes also have.

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 is important for projects large and small, so we will take about in some depth.

Visions, one of Magento’s Enterprise partners, are working with many of these clients and during that work they have written a well-informed article about Magento scalability and performance in large stores.

Be sure to read their article in Magento’s official blog if you are working with an enterprise client:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/understanding-magento-scalability-and-performance-1/

Magento 1.3.2.2 released

Varien released the Magento 1.3.2.2 Community Update today. As usual we go through the most important updates in the update. Read more

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. Read more

Display best selling product in magento

Want to display the best selling products in your Magento store on the frontpage or anywhere else in your store? The best selling products means the products sold in highest quantity in Ascending order. This functionality is for some strange reason not included in Magento by default so we’ll explain how you can set it up yourself.

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() ?>

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 experience with the Drupal Magento module.

You’ll find more info here:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/1020/drupal