Lesson 1: A little Magento history
Let’s start the series with a little Magento history. Varien is a company founded in 2001 by Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner (take a look at the current Magento Leadership). Varien did many e-commerce implementations using osCommerce. Lack of stability, features and flexibility of osCommerce made them decide to start a new e-commerce project in 2007. They released the first beta version of Magento on August 31 of that year and Magento 1.0 stable was released on March 31st 2008 under the Open Software License (OSL) 3.0. Recently, Varien changed names to Magento Inc. and they now have 115+ employees in Los Angeles and the Ukraine. Currently, there are 3 versions of Magento: Community (1.4), Professional and Enterprise (1.9).
The international website for Magento is magentocommerce.com. It’s the place for everything official from Magento Inc. The parts you’ll be using most are:
- Magento Connect – The place to look for Magento extensions: software that is used to extend the functionality of Magento.
- Blog – Here you can find updates about new versions, newly released webshops, event invitations and all kinds of other news from Magento Inc.
- Forum – If you have a problem or question and Google, the documentation or wiki didn’t work out, take a look at the forum, there’s always someone around to help.
Besides the above, you’ll also spend some time around the official resources (documentation, wiki, screencasts etc.), but that’s something for another week :).
Tasks for this week:
- Read the Open Software License 3.0 so you know what companies and end-user are (and aren’t) allowed to do with Magento.
- Take a look at the official showcase or sites like Magentique to see examples of shops released with Magento. This way you’ll get a feeling of what can be done with Magento in the frontend (answer: almost anything ;)).
- Learn what the differences are between the Magento Community Edition, the Professional Edition and the Enterprise Edition. Also look at the comparison chart and Edition FAQ.
That should keep you busy in your first week. Good luck and let me know how it worked out!
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