Me at work in the Magento Kitchen - This is where all the sweet stuff is made!
Well, guess you didn’t expect a literal interpretation of the post title did you? :D
It’s my entry for the Contest for the Magento Imagine Conference next month in Los Angeles. Would be great to win one of the great prices in the contest and maybe even get the chance to take a look at the Magento kitchen at the LA Headquarters…
Read more →Ok, enough about the Magento Ecosystem, let’s start the new year by start digging into Magento itself! Again, the course is not meant to make you a Magento programmer, but you will find it useful when you’re able to play with Magento yourself to try things out. In order to do so you will need your own Magento installation before preceding to the following lessons. If you have a webhost that provides automated installation of Magento you can skip this lesson, if not, here’s what you need to do:
A detailed installation instruction can be found on magentocommerce.com. If you run into problems, ask a techie to help or ask around on the Magento forum :).
Next lesson: Magento multistore.
This post is part of the free Magento Guru Course. I give you tips, tricks and tasks to become a Magento expert in 6 months. Don’t miss out on all the goodies: subscribe now to the newsletter, RSS feed or Facebook page!
I actually decided not to do any xmas/newyears stuff on my website but what the heck… ;)
Here are the 8 things I wish everyone knew about (Magento) webshops:
I Wish…
And here are 4 extra wishes for webshops in general:
I Also Wish…
So these were my wishes, but what about yours? Let me know what you think people should know about Magento in the comments!
Have a Magestic 2011 everyone!
Read more →Today I presented my ‘Introduction to Magento’ to customers of a hosting company in The Netherlands (Oxilion). I made the (3,5 hour) presentation with the prezi.com tool and I’d like to share it here with you.
PS: You don’t have to follow the fixed path of the presentation, you can pan and zoom as you like!
I also got some really nice reactions from people who attended the seminar:
First of Guido does not use powerpoint or keynote, but prezi.com wich makes the presentation itself just a little more interactive and special. And there was Guido’s knowledge of the subject, the way he interacts and his humor. I’ve had great fun and learned a lot, I’d actually like to hire him but well.. He’s got a job ;-)
Floris Diemel – Commercial Manager (CCO), Cambrium
As Community Manager for Magento he knows his share, and was willing to share with us, what the Magento Community can and can not do. All in all it turned out to be a great seminar with lots of positive response. Thank you Guido, for the inspiring session!
Niek Slaghekke – Sales Consultant, Oxilion
I attended the session to get to know Magento better and know what ist’s abilities are and whether it could be used for a future webshop for my company. The presentation itself was very well designed, executed with both patience and humor and Guido made sure the audience kept involved and alert at all times. In the meantime, I managed to learn quite a lot from it too. I would recommend Guido as a speaker when it comes to Magento and especially when there is a less-then-formal atmosphere.
Randal Peelen – Productmanager, Cambrium
Read more →It’s Friday so it’s time for the next Magento interview! This time we have the honor to learn more about Sherrie Rohde.
Sherrie lives in Illinois, USA and works as a Multimedia Graphic Designer at Minerva Promotions. You can find here online on her website sherrierohde.com and connect with here on LinkedIn, Skype (kreativ.slr), Twitter or the Magento forum as sherrie where she is one of the forum moderators.
So let’s get started and meet Sherrie!
Sherrie showing her love for Magento
I think my strongest childhood daydream was to be an Olympian Gold Medalist whether it be for soccer, snowboarding or figure skating—the event seemed to change based on my stage in life.
Life is what you make of it, if you want to have an average life than by all means sit around and do nothing. I have huge goals so I work on myself daily whether it be through reading, association or simple steps along the way.
I start the day way too early (in my humble yet accurate opinion) but well caffeinated drawing pretty pictures at work. I code, too, but my favorite description of what I do is drawing pretty pictures. After work I generally am active for about an hour whether it’s running, cross training or cycling. From there it varies depending on the day but I always find time to catch up with friends and be productive before falling asleep in a good book.
Anything I can still remember the next day that involves being with my friends.
Everything. I kid, sort of. I really believe I can accomplish pretty much everything I put my mind too, though. So I guess I’m good at problem solving and determination!
Sitting still. I’m pretty sure I have undiagnosed ADD. In fact, an online test told me so once.
I’m proud of who I am and who I am working towards being. I’m proud of my refusal to be average.
We needed a low cost e-commerce solution at work and I happened to be on a competitor’s forum where someone threw in a plug for Magento. At this point the first stable release had not yet been made but I dove right in and got my hands dirty. By the time Magento was ready to launch, so were we.
Magento has proven to be a fantastic flexible solution to meet our constantly growing and changing needs.
Magento is not a click and go product. If you want to get dirty and have fun then by all means have a blast! Just don’t expect to not do anything at all and then complain about it later. It is a learning curve, depending on your current knowledge, but it’s totally worth it.
To be honest, Magento has all the features we currently need. The ones it lacks I’ve added in on my own.
Nothing really comes to mind.
Haha … my own. :). I actually have two extensions. One of them allows store owners to enter multiple flat rate options for the customer to select from – alternatively this can be used to select pickup locations. The other extension allows the store owner to set a minimum quantity of items in the shopping cart required in order for the checkout button to be active.
The search functionality—it used to be so good, allowing you to pick which sections of the site to search (i.e. wiki, forums, etc), I don’t know what happened to it. Also, the current captcha and I fight. A lot.
My future plans for Magento usage are to continually stay up to date with our installations at work while pursuing new innovative ways to use it for our needs as well as continual work with the Magento staff on various tutorial documents and forum moderation tasks.
…it gives you the flexibility to make it whatever you need it to be without the hassle of implementing core features upfront.
Thanks Sherrie for your cooperation! Next time I’ll interview Brent Peterson from Wagento Data Consulting LLC. If you want to stay up-to-date, you can subscribe to the RSS feed, the Newsletter or my Facebook page.
Read more →And it’s Friday again which means it’s time for the next Magento interview! After Vinai Kopp and Artyom Rabzonov it’s time for Jisse Reitsma!
Jisse is co-founder of Yireo, the Dutch company mainly know for it’s Magento-Joomla bridge solution called MageBridge. He is in charge of the companies development and you can connect with him online on Twitter and LinkedIn.
So let’s fill that gap in our knowledge and learn all about Jisse! :)
Jisse Reitsma teaching MageBridge
I actually dreamed of a standard mediocre life – a wife, kids and a house. Unfortunately I now have passed the 30 and I am still not there yet. What am I doing wrong?
Do good and you will receive good. It seems so simple, but it’s actually pretty hard some times.
A working day starts of with answering customers that have questions on both our free as our commercial Yireo extensions. That takes about 1 hour. After that, there is always projects or software development that ask attention. We tend the react quickly on feature requests, so things are never boring.
Drinking a bit with friends or stroll down an avenue hand-in-hand with my girlfriend. I’m already happy with simple things.
Object Oriented Programming in PHP.
Sales.
Within a year and a half we have developed our MageBridge extension (a bridge between Joomla! and Magento) from the ground. Instead of being just a bridge, it has actually become a whole new technology of extending Joomla! with Magento extensions and vice versa. I’m pretty proud of the code base that has grown so rapidly, while the architecture is still fast and efficient.
I was actually forced into using Magento by business partner, who said Magento was going to be the next big thing. I’m always pretty stubborn when it comes to things like this, so I only touched Magento after three months.
We are developing Magento extensions and giving Magento consults. Simply put: We are making good money with Magento.
Magento is a fantastic product, but it has a steep learning curve. If you’re just looking for a simple shop you will become very disappointed. However, if you want to take a dive and want to keep growing with your webshop, then Magento is definitively worth the effort.
jQuery
ProtoType
Most of the time it’s our own MageBridge extension, because we simply sell more MageBridge webshops then Magento webshops.
Documentation. Everybody says that Magento is very complicated and that the learning curve is steep. However, there is little good documentation available. Luckily enough there are already many books out there about the administration of the Magento backend, but still – better documentation on webdesign and programming is still needed.
With MageBridge we connect Joomla! and Magento, and while there are no big changes planned in Magento in the near future (upcoming months), there is still Joomla! 1.6 coming up – to make MageBridge compatible with Joomla! 1.6 will consume most of my time. But with Magento, we plan to release a couple of new versions for our Yireo Magento extensions. The usual stuff…
…it shows that commercial goals and open source ideals are indeed easy to combine.
Thanks Jisse for your cooperation! Next week I’ll interview Sherrie Rohde from Minerva Promotions. If you want to stay up-to-date, you can subscribe to the RSS feed, the Newsletter or my Facebook page.
Read more →Last week I started of a new series on my blog interviewing people from the Magento community all around the world. I started by interviewing Vinai Kopp, next up is Artyom Rabzonov!
Artyom is CEO and one of the founders of the aheadWorks company from Minsk (Belarus) that we (probably) all know for all of it’s Magento extensions (and recently also Magento Themes). He works on (project) management and human resources and you can find him online on Skype (a.rabzonov), as aheadWorks on the Magento forum or on LinkedIn.
Let’s find out what Artyom has been up to lately…!
As many of USSR children I was dreaming of becoming a cosmonaut :).
Don’t hesitate, and never regret about the chosen way.
Nothing unusual – I’m an office dweller mostly ) My normal activity is team management, processing some incoming requests, establishing new partnerships, strategic planning – that’s what I’m busy with during a normal working day.
That night out on Mallorca (Magento Developers Paradise – Guido) was close to be ideal – warm night on an island, bars, dances and a bit of alcohol. But the main component is company – joyful happy people whom pleasure to spend time with.
PC gaming. Joke, that what I was good at some time ago ) It looks like I’m good at organizing people – that’s why we have a strong and smoothly working team now.
Understanding new programming techniques. I used to be a programmer but in the last years my focus had moved to management and coordination. Hope to have a bit more time to overtake the knowledge in the nearest future, as computing is what I’m fond of.
I’m really proud of my company and of all what we managed to achieve during the last years. aheadWorks had been started over 5 years ago by 3 graduates – my 2 companions Cyril and Eugene, and me, and has turned into a reliable solutions partner with good positions on the market. Nowadays there are more than 30 people working with us and this number is constantly growing. I see many dedicated people here who love what they do and from the other side I see many satisfied customers – isn’t that what I must be proud of?
We had discovered Magento in late 2008, I was one of the first in aheadWorks who tried to use and develop for Magento, did some coding those days. We searched the forum, communicated with people, found an idea and implemented a solution. It was free and not too complex, however the success was obvious: the extension had hundreds of downloads in just a few days and many people were asking about new features.
Simply because it opens great opportunities. It won’t be exaggeration to say that our primary focus is Magento. Strong community,
good architecture, scalability, unique distribution model, fast growth and evolution – all these things make Magento outstanding and attractive for us.
Magento has taken over e-commerce solution market, on its platform you can build basically any solution you need, but don’t expect it coming out of the box. A bit of patience and diligence and you can start selling absolutely anything – from 1-cent-pins to heavy machinery, from hotel bookings to magazine subscriptions – just put a bit of efforts and have your business running online.
As our company sells digital goods we’d like to see stronger digital products support. But even more we’d encourage core development and refactoring.
Magento is quite consistent, I cannot say there is something unnecessary. The features we don’t use are required by other merchants so I can hardly recollect anything what must be removed.
Help Desk Ultimate and Advanced Reports, both by aheadWorks of course :) These products are somewhat required for any Magento based store as they add functionality you can hardly live without.
I’d like to see better Magento Connect. The Magento Inc. team did a good job organizing and structuring the extensions, adding new categories, filters, etc. Now it’s time to think about proper content. There are lots of neglected and lowest-quality extensions, test uploads, which perplex and frustrate merchants who look for extending their stores functionality.
Without proper content moderation or a kind of certification program Magento Connect will lose its power.
Our primary effort during the last months is Magento iPhone Theme – a highly required and anticipated product. The release is planned on 24 November, and the last week we had published a video preview of the product which has already gained lots of feedback, we are receiving tons of new inqueries.
Another new upcoming products for this year: Order Flags extension which is dedicated to save time managing orders and make this process more effective; Popup extension for marketing and advertising purposes; and RMA extension, the name speaks for itself – it will add proper return material authorization ability into Magento. All these extensions were developed basing on feedback from our valued visitors and customers on our forum – forum.aheadworks.com
Also you can expect updates of Checkout Promo, Advanced Newsletter, Product Questions, Subscriptions and Recurring Payments extensions – all releases will contain new functionality and some fixes. So as you can see we are having hot time here )
Besides product updates we are also focused on building a strong Magento community here and plan to organize local Magento meetup events next year, which must be popular due to great number of local developers, and we know many of them work with Magento platform.
…it’s innovative, scalable, open source, easily extendible platform with amazing active community. It’s not only about the code – it’s about people, and there are thousands of people who love Magento and that’s why it will continue to prosper with no doubts.
Thanks Artyom for your cooperation! Next week I’ll interview Jisse Reitsma from Yireo. If you want to stay up-to-date, you can subscribe to the RSS feed, the Newsletter or my Facebook page.
Read more →
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