It is nice to have a list with top extensions to consider when you start a Magento store. Since Magento Connect now has 2450+ extensions I can imagine it's hard for Magento newbies to get started. But instead of making my own list or referring you to other top lists (there are many out there) I thought it would be nice to do some meta research to create the 'ultimate' Magento extension list. What I did was quite simple: I collected all Top X Magento lists I could find (7 to be exact). Every time an extensions is listed I gave it one point. In the end I counted the points for every extension and the extensions with the most points ended up in my 'Ultimate Magento Extensions List'. Here's an overview of 'Top X' lists containing Magento Extensions.
1) 6 points:
2) 5 points:
3) 4 points:
After the Top 3 there are a bunch of extensions getting 3 points:
All other extensions got 2 or less points. Congratulations to Aheadworks for making it to the top of the list with their Blog Extension (they also just made it compatible with Enterprise 1.8, nice work!).
(If you know about any other lists that are published after July 1st 2009, let me know and I'll include them!)
Web Design & Development (December 7th, 2009)
Network One (March 2010)
MyHosting.com (October 26th, 2009)
EvoHosting - 10 of the Best Free Extensions for Magento (July 21st, 2009)
Visionwidget - 30 Essential Free Magento Extensions (September 12th, 2009)
Richard Castera - The Best Magento Extensions (August 14th, 2009)
10 Great Magento Extensions For Your E-Commerce Store (August 27th, 2009) This list also contained several commercial extensions which I removed.
Notes:
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Recently I've seen some (often absolute) statements going around, generally in the line of "open source commerce platforms are a terrible idea". Now of course different solutions always have different pros and cons.
A hierarchy of evidence (or levels of evidence) is a heuristic used to rank the relative strength of results obtained from scientific research. I've created a version of this chart/pyramid applied to CRO which you can see below. It contains the options we have as optimizers and tools and methods we often use to gather data.