Category: Magento

I have been using Magento for ecommerce development and really like it. I’ll share tips and advice for working with it and improving your Magento Development.

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10 Steps to Magento Ecommerce on a (small) Budget

This post basically regurgitates greatly expands on an email I sent to a good friend of mine this week when he asked me about building an ecommerce webstore, and whether the quote he had of $25,000 was reasonable for an owner-operator hand-painted pottery website. Hint: it’s not.

Naturally enough I didn’t think that was reasonable, and I listed a few simple steps that can be taken to get a free Magento webstore up and running for a small budget – at least an order of magnitude less than the agency quote. The catch is, it takes a bit of elbow grease and tech savvy – it doesn’t require you to actually program computers though.

I’ll state upfront, I’m the kind of person who would rather have a store that only does half of the things you want it to, running; than one that is still in development with load of great features ‘coming soon’. I subscribe to the actually shipping is the best feature philosophy of software development (that’s also my excuse for releasing buggy beta software).

So, with the 10 steps below, you can join the dot.com boom and get selling your products online through Magento. I’ll run through the steps below, and try to keep a running tally of costs as we go. If you spot anything you disagree with, please comment, I’d like this to be as accurate as possible. Preamble over, let’s get down to it.

Continue reading 10 Steps to Magento Ecommerce on a (small) Budget

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Magento Backup extension: Cloud Backup – it’s finally approved!

Just a quick note to let you all know the wait is over (2.5 weeks stuck pending!), our latest extension has been approved and you can try off site, automated backups for free! by downloading it from Magento connect.

There was much merriment in the office as you can imagine:
celebrating the release of our new extension

On a related note; I’ve not been a big advocate for twitter over the years, but twice now it has prevailed over traditional support methods. Firstly with 2 Degrees, and now more recently it out supported forums to finally get some help from Varien, thanks @_snowcore!

I think twitter puts the support on public display. It’d be like if there was a website that showed the average wait time for big Telcos to answer their phones and those much touted call logs that they use to improve their service and training, were openly shared on the internet for everyone to listen to. Or maybe twitter gets results because someone in the marketing department is on a ‘social media’ buzz, who knows – but I can tell you it works.

For others with extensions that are stuck pending on Magento Connect, it looks like it’s a matter that requires human intervention and you best bet is to seek out attention from Varien.

So, if anyone has any questions about using the Magento Backup tool we’ve finally released, they should tweet me, or whatever.

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Magento vs Wp-E-Commerce: a comparison case study

Being a computer programmer typically means all of your friends and family immediately assume you a) can fix their wireless router and b) want to. For the same reason we often get asked to help make a website, blog, webstore, killer web 2.0 app or all of the above – which in the most part I can’t help with through lack of spare time. But I did manage to fit a WordPress + WP-E-Commerce project in, and this is a case study of that development project in particular, comparing WP-E-Commerce to Magento.

My girlfriend Cindy asked me to help with her latest venture, Cheap Titles – so naturally I helped whip up a site. Despite spending most of my time developing Magento, I actually thought I’d give the WordPress + WP-E-Commerce combo a try. I’ll summarize my rationale for that in the next section – suffice to say it made some things a lot easier.

So this is a little blog post that summarizes my experiences making the site with WP-E-Commerce, what I noticed different about the platform, as compared to Magento – and in particular how I found the underlying code quality of WP-E-Commerce measured against Magento.

Continue reading Magento vs Wp-E-Commerce: a comparison case study

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TweetBeeper.com – A Free Email to Direct Message Service (and Email to SMS too)

I just uploaded Tweet Beeper to Google App Engine. It’s a simple application that receives an email, and then converts the subject line into a twitter direct message (which in turn can be an SMS sent to the recipients phone). A little whimsical, I know, but the weather was fairly average here this weekend!

TweetBeeper in 1 Minute

How do I use it? Easy!

  1. Follow @TweetBeeper on Twitter.
  2. Send a subject-line email to:
    your-twitter-id [at] tweetbeeper.appspotmail.com

What can it do?

  1. Cron Job Output to Direct Messages
  2. Webstore monitor failures to SMS
  3. Magento Sale notification emails (or any store)
  4. … and any other situations where email to SMS would be handy

TweetBeeper.com - Email to twitter Direct Message service

Continue reading TweetBeeper.com – A Free Email to Direct Message Service (and Email to SMS too)

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Magento Backups: How To Ensure Your Data Is Safe with Magento Cloud Backup

This is a blog post about Magento backups, how you can do them by default in Magento and how a new extension I have made called Cloud Backup will help to make them automatically and send them offsite to Amazon’s S3 storage service – increasing the chance you’ll have a recent backup if (when) bad things happen to your store or server. I’d like your help beta testing this new extension, and this post will hopefully convince you why that’s mutually beneficial for us. The extension is still pending on Magento Connect so give it a whirl, I’ll update this post with the link shortly, or for those that are particularly keen to test it, you can download the release directly and install it manually.
Continue reading Magento Backups: How To Ensure Your Data Is Safe with Magento Cloud Backup