Post-Earthquake Map Tiles for Haiti
Haiti Terrain Maps and OpenStreetMap Tiles on MapBox
We just added seven new map tilesets of Haiti to MapBox.com, created after the January 12 earthquake. Two of these sets are of terrain baselayers - one is a clean grey tile designed to be overlaid with data visualizations and the other is a terrain tile showing color-coded elevations in Haiti - and both cover the entire island. We also created three sets of overlays that work with the terrain data to show roads, collapsed buildings, and seismic data from the earthquake.
Seismic data from the January 12 earthquake in Haiti, overlaid on our Haiti Terrain Grey tile.
Baselayers specificsThe two terrain baselayers are generated from SRTM elevation models. Haiti Terrain is a combination of a hillshade/color-relief map and emphasizes the topography of the island. Haiti Terrain Grey is a hillshade layer intended to be used as a more subtle backdrop to additional overlaid data.
OverlaysThe main overlay maps all roads, labels, parks, buildings, and some other features using data from OpenStreetMap. Volunteers have been doing an unbelievable job of improving OpenStreetMap in Haiti since the disaster. OSM's data - which is completely open and free for anyone to use - is now the best source for Haiti maps and continues to improve every day. Best of all, it is being used on the ground to save lives.
Yesterday’s New Magento EE 1.7 Webinar Recording Now Available
Thank you to all those who attended yesterday’s excellent webinar introducing and showing off some of the great new features in Magento Enterprise Edition Version 1.7. The recording is now available, along with many of our other great webinars, for viewing and downloading in the Magento http://www.magentocommerce.com/media/webinar-archive.
A transcript will be provided shortly as well. For more information on Magento Enterprise Edition Version 1.7 please contact us.
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Win an Apple iPad with Dimdim!
That's right, Dimdim can help you get a new Apple iPad!
Simply sign up for a 30-day Dimdim Pro trial via this URL and you instantly qualify to win the new Apple iPad! It's that simple.
You will fall in love with Dimdim, the easy, open, affordable web conferencing tool while you wait to get your iPad. We'll pick a winner in the next week, so sign up now! No credit card required.
And tell all your friends via this Twitter link about our contest - if we reach 5x our normal daily signups by Tuesday we'll give away 5 iPads! So tweet away to increase your chances of winning!
(And we'll determine if there is enough buzz & excitement to build Dimdim for iPad) Stay tuned!
Evaluating Paid Development
As you know, this past fall OSM started to pay Louis and Andrew for a day or two of their time per week working on Joomla! Development. This was done as an experiment, and now is the time at which we will begin evaluation of the results. The most important question is: what is the impact of this on our community of contributors, which is to say the people who are contributing to the Joomla! project. We are also interested in the thoughts of the wider world of engaged users and Joomla! business people who may not contribute directly, but do have a stake in the continued success of the Joomla! Project. We invite everyone to participate in this process by filling out this form. We'll collect responses until 11:55pm UTC on January 31 2010.
We want to emphasize that this form focuses on the actual impact on people and firms, not on philosophical discussions or speculation about the impact on other people.
Of course a form like this is not in any way a vote or a popularity contest, nor is it scientific. It is simply one of a number of ways of collecting information from people with a variety of experiences and backgrounds. We'll be sharing the results of this and other analyses in February.
Thanks for your help with this.
Magento Sites Amongst the Top 35 Beautiful eCommerce Websites
Recently, Smashing Magazine did a showcase of beautiful eCommerce store designs. We know that there are a few amazingly well-designed Magento stores out there and just a few happened to be on the list. Below is a rundown of some that made it and what Smashing Magazine had to say about them.
If you’re looking for resources around designing a Magento shop be to check out these great resources. The official Magento Designer’s Guide, Inchoo’s Designer’s Guide to Magento, and this great multi-part series currently running on eCommerce Developer on Building a Magento Theme Start to Finish.
Fred Perry’s e-commerce store has a contemporary and elegant look, conveying key features of the brand very well. The stylish grayscale color scheme, along with sparse text in Helvetica font, make an impact. The design naturally combines Flash and JavaScript. The mini-cart window, the readable layout of the shopping cart and checkout pages, the usable navigation and informative product descriptions all up to a slick and friendly shopping experience.
Olive & Myrtle produces beautiful sustainably developed goodies. A clear layout, soft natural colors and subtle typography make this website look modern and eco-friendly.
Premium sports apparel brand ’47 has an interesting history: “This is a classic story. It’s the American dream come to life…” Thus, the company emphasizes the individuality of its brand in its store design and associates that brand with a community. The website combines jQuery and Flash, which slows the loading speed, but given its objective, this is not critical. Creative visualization and a well-implemented shopping mechanism make for a wonderful e-commerce design.
Blik manufactures whimsical removable graphics to spice up the walls of your home. Even though the “About” info gets a bit lost in the large product preview in the center, getting an idea of what Blik is all about doesn’t take longer than a couple of seconds. Aside from the stylish look, the easy shopping experience is what makes this design exquisite: all products are categorized by tags, the thumbnails are big, product descriptions are detailed and supported by decal outlines, and quick tips are placed here and there for maximum assurance. Vintage-looking faded colors and rotating logo add considerably to the elegance.
The design of German club-wear and accessories store Bellyshades stands out for sure. The vibrant acid colors, insane typography and animals that stand in for shopping carts will leave you anything but cold.
Rules and standards are made to be broken from time to time. You don’t have to speak Russian to tell that the design of Ukrainian t-shirt store Teez is far from ordinary. A chaotic mash of text and images is obviously a new trend in Web design. Despite all of this, the shop looks and feels pretty darn awesome. Take a minute to explore the website and you’ll see how easy it is to shop there. Off-the-chart creativity!
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GeoDC Meetup on Wednesday, January 27
Mapping Haiti, Washington, DC, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo
The next GeoDC meetup will take place on Wednesday, January 27th, starting at 7:00 pm. This will be a particularly exciting meetup as many of our members have been heavily involved with CrisisCamp's response to the earthquake in Haiti. We'll get a chance to hear from folks from FortiusOne on the mapping projects started to aid relief and recovery efforts, the progress made, and how the community plans to move forward.
Magento Reaches 1.5 Million+ Downloads
Magento reaches another milestone, recording over 1.5 million downloads! Congrats to the team and the Magento community for the phenomenal growth.
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DP Bestflow: The Definitive Online Guide to Digital Photography
After a highly successful Drupal deployment for the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) national website, the ASMP decided to again use Drupal for their next project: Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow, or dpBestflow for short. DP Bestflow is a Library of Congress-funded initiative to provide an all-encompassing resource for digital photography best practices.
The ASMP once again teamed up with Chicago's Grillo Group for graphic design, and Philadelphia-based web development firm Context to perform the Drupal implementation. The most impressive part of the site, however, is the immense amount of rich, useful content, the majority of which is the handiwork of digital photography gurus Richard Anderson (author of Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow) and Peter Krogh (author of The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers).
Week in DC Tech: January 25th Edition
Maps, Photography, Start Ups, and CrisisCamp Haiti this week in Washington, DC
There are many interesting technology events happening in Washington, DC this week, focusing on everything from international mapping efforts by local experts - including ones of Haiti to be used in earthquake relief efforts - to photography tips from a pro to a start up challenge for university students. Below are the ones that piqued our interest, and you can find a full list of the weeks happenings at DC Tech Events. Have a great week!
Monday, January 25Noon - 1:30 pm
The Administration's Strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan: At this event, National Security Advisor James L. Jones will discuss the Obama Administration's current strategy on Afghanistan and its larger national security goals moving forward. A panel discussion will follow, analyzing Afghanistan's current government and approaches the international community can take in the region.
Take the Magento User Survey!
Does your company use Magento or are you currently evaluating Magento as your next eCommerce platform? If so, we'd love to hear from you.
The survey will take only a few short minutes. The information collected will help us improve our offerings and services as well as shape Magento's product roadmap in the months to come.
We'll be giving away a free Google Nexus One phone to one lucky respondent, selected randomly from all fully completed survey submissions, so make sure to make your voice heard for a chance to win!
Your help and feedback are greatly appreciated!
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Automated testing 2.1 deployed - contributed projects
After a lot of work, waiting, staging, and such I am proud to announce the addition of contributed projects to the automated testing system. Contributed projects may now take advantage of the same system that Drupal core developers have been using for over a year with great success. The deployment comes quickly after the recent 2.0 launch in late November of 2009. In addition to adding support for contributed project testing a number of other features have been added, most notably:
- Coder and Coder Tough Love review support.
- General e-mail notifications - the devlist mailing list will get an e-mail when Drupal core breaks.
- A number of UI/workflow improvments on drupal.org.
- Grouping of reviews by type or plugin to make room for a cleaner multiple database testing workflow.
- Additional administrative tools for qa.drupal.org and testing clients.
- Views RSS feed plugin for aggregation of test events and results.
For an example of the test results, please take a look at the current Drupal 7 (HEAD) results or one of our beta contributed project results, such as poormanscron.
Magento Connect Features: ‘aheadWorks’
Hello community, Tim here… Some of you might have read my first post last week, and I wanted to provide you with another update before signing off for the weekend.
As I’ve been learning more about our community over the last couple weeks, one thing that has impressed me is the level of quality coming from our extension-marketplace. As Magento Connect continues to grow, many developers are building fantastic products (as well as thriving businesses) around our platform, resulting in hundreds of extensions that make our 35,000+ merchants successful. With such a thriving ecosystem, I thought it would be fitting to begin featuring the most impressive Magento-Connect developers. and our very first featured story is aheadWorks.
aheadWorks began developing extensions for Magento Connect last year as “lostdocs7”, and this past week they celebrated their first-year anniversary. They’ve built over 30 extensions and 18 themes in just one year, and they have plans to develop that same amount this year. If you haven’t seen any of their extensions yet, be sure to take a look at their website. For you extension developers out there looking to take your businesses to the next level, pay particular attention to the creative quality of aheadWorks’ product presentation, marketing, and value-driven product descriptions (i.e. explaining the business impact of their extensions in the first 5 seconds).
I’m also happy to announce that aheadWorks is now offering a special 35% discount specifically for our Magento community. From now until Monday, January 25th, enter promo-code MAGENTOCONNECT35 upon checkout and you’ll receive 35% off the final total (click here to jump to their website) . If you’ve been holding out to purchase your aheadWorks extensions, here’s your chance! There are many to choose from, but I’ve listed my top-10 favorites below.
But just before I dive into the top-10… If you know of any interesting success stories from our community, please feel free to email me. I’m looking to post many more featured stories like these in the future. Have a great weekend!
Tim’s Top-10 Favorite aheadWorks extensions
Z-Blocks
Uses native Magento functionality to create an unlimited number of static blocks and content items so you don’t need to manually change your template and layout files every time you make changes.
Follow-Up Email
A comfortable and flexible way to automatically reach out to customers on day X after an order had been placed.
AJAX Cart Pro
Effectively removes those annoying page reloads that frequently occur when users click “add to cart” and “delete from cart”.
Help Desk Ultimate
A fully-featured help desk extension.
Advanced Reports
Improves the functionality of native Magento reports and creates a complete picture of your business.
On Sale
Allows users to add visually-appealing labels to any product image. The labels can then be displayed in both the product and catalog views.
Subscriptions and Recurring Payments
Extends native Magento abilities by allowing merchants to accept recurring payments and sell subscription products.
Featured Products
Drive more of your visitors’ attention to your best and most profitable products.
Facebook Link
Makes it easier for customers to invite their friends to your store via Facebook.
Automatic Related Products
Allows you to automate the process of related products creation.
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From the Support Team: Boosting Sales by Offering Free Shipping
This post is part of a weekly series by the Magento Enterprise Edition subscription support team covering tips, tricks and hints to some of the most common, and uncommon, issues as submitted by support customers.
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Hey everybody, its me Tomas again! Magento Enterprise Edition Version 1.7 was just released this week and with a some great new features aimed at enhancing the customer experience and increasing customer loyalty. One great way to establish repeat customers and boost sales is to offer free shipping. Hey, everyone loves free stuff!
A common inquiry that we often receive here at the Magento support desk is how to configure Magento to offer free shipping to customers. Right out-of-the-box, Magento has multiple ways to accomplish this depending on the factors you choose to offer free shipping. Let’s run through some of the scenarios together and get a better understanding of how to configure Magento in each instance.
Scenario 1: Carrier Free Shipping with minimum order amount (without using a Shopping Cart Price Rule)
In this scenario, we’ll be offering free UPS Ground shipping for orders above $99. To do this we need to go to System -> Configuration -> Sales -> Shipping Methods ->UPS, and we need to set the free method to ‘Ground’ and provide the minimum amount value.
The screenshot below shows the UPS Ground shipping method is now free during shopping cart checkout.
Scenario 2: Carrier Free Shipping with minimum order amount using a Shopping Cart Price Rule
In this scenario, we will be offering free UPS Ground shipping method for orders above $99 but through a Shopping Cart Price Rule. Here however, we will be using a Coupon Code, set up through Promotions -> Shopping Cart Price Rules so that the free shipping will automatically apply if the conditions are met.
Since our Shopping Cart Rule is not limited to any product attributes, we can either choose “For matching items only” or “For shipment with matching items” in the Shopping Cart Price Rule Actions as Free Shipping option.
Lastly, in System -> Configuration -> Sales -> Shipping Methods ->UPS, we need to set the free method to ‘Ground’ and, unlike the first scenario, we will not be providing a minimum amount.
Although setup differently, we get the same results as the first scenario.
Scenario 3: Carrier Free Shipping for specific items
In this scenario, we will be offering free UPS Ground shipping for products within a specific category (i.e. Furniture category).
Since our free shipment is limited to Furniture items only, we must set the same conditions under the Shopping Cart Price Rules Actions section.
Now here, if we select “For matching items only”, if there are multiple items in the shopping cart, the free shipping will only apply for the product within the Furniture category and other shipment charges on non-furniture items will be calculated separately.
On the other hand, if we choose “For shipment with matching items” free shipping will apply to the whole cart with multiple items in it as long as an applicable furniture product is included.
These scenarios all provide just a few of the many techniques to offer free shipping to your customers. We hope this will help you in setting up your own free shipping benefits to customers, help drive more sales and keep your customers happy and loyal. For all this and other great customer experience enhancing features, make sure to check on the all new Magento Enterprise Edition Version 1.7 and sign up for next week’s webinar showing off all the innovative new features.
Happy e-Commerce!
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SlingshotSMS 0.2 Released: Now Providing RSS 2.0 and Modem Autodetection
Today SlingshotSMS has a new release for Mac and Windows and a lot of new documentation. Most importantly, it now produces RSS 2.0, works with a larger variety of modems, and can auto-connect to new devices.
Using SlingshotSMS is a lot smoother now too. Just double-click the SlingshotSMS icon in the distribution and it will launch as an OS X application.
It opens up http://localhost:8080/ in a browser, and documentation and demos are immediately available.
Documenting SlingshotSMS has been a learning experience, particularly in making documentation usable and maintainable. In this case, Python's docutils has been very important. With docutils, the documentation - written in reStructedText - is parsed by GitHub for the project page Readme and is also parsed by docutils, which is built into SlingshotSMS to provide interactive documentation while running SlingshotSMS locally.
DrupalCon SF Session Submissions Open
The San Francisco DrupalCon organizing committee is happy to announce that session submissions are open!
Come see the sessions that have already been proposed, and if you can't find exactly what you're looking for, suggest your own. Drupal's community is what sets it apart from the pack, so come be a part of the magic!
The session submission and voting schedule is:
- January 15, 2010 to February 15, 2010 - Session Submissions Open
- February 16, 2010 - March 1, 2010 - Public Voting on Sessions
- March 5, 2010 - Speakers Notified
- March 15, 2010 - Final Schedule Posted
Scheduled drupal.org downtime Saturday 2010-01-23 2:00AM to 3:00AM UTC
On Saturday 2010-01-23 from 2:00AM to 3:00AM UTC (6PM-7PM PST), drupal.org will be down for scheduled maintenance. We will be deploying an update to our unit testing framework. We appreciate your patience during this outage, the site will be back up as soon as possible.
Webinar: Introducing Magento Enterprise Edition v1.7
Magento Webinar
Introducing Magento Enterprise Edition v1.7
Magento Enterprise Edition Version 1.7 was recently announced. The new release features enhancements and new functionality focusing on enhancing customer loyalty through a reward points system, performance enhancement through full page caching and many other key administrative functionality improvements.
Please join us for a special webinar introduction to demonstration of these new features. Topics include:
- An introduction to the new version 1.7 of Magento Enterprise Edition
- An overview of Enterprise Edition 1.7 features
- Magento Enterprise Edition Reward Points System
- Highly Tuned Page Performance using Full Page Caching
- Over 15 additional improvements for administrators including sales report optimization, WYSIWYG Editing for Products, Categories, and email templates, Design Theme & Packages Facilitation, Custom Variables for use in email templates and CMS, and upgrades to the Magento Enterprise Edition CMS+ content management engine.
Date: Wednesday, January 27th, 9:00 AM (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
Registration: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/151801883
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SharkScopers
SharkScopers is a Drupal 6 site that allows online poker instructors to sell screencast tutorial videos. The first two minutes can be viewed by anyone. Users can purchase credits that unlock whole videos. Instructors then receive a cut of the profit.
Jonathan Brown from Blue Droplet Media in Edinburgh, Scotland, has been helping Mike Jonas from SharkScope in New York develop the site for more than a year. It uses Jonathan's Blue Droplet Video module extensively.
Mike had done a lot of research into what system should be used to build the site. His primary motivation for choosing Drupal was so that Blue Droplet Video could be used. He was blown away by how BDV integrates with CCK and Views, allowing the fundamentals of the site to be created with great ease.
Jonathan and Mike have very well defined roles within the project. For each task, they consult via email and Skype to construct robust specifications. Jonathan then implements the required functionality. A release early, release often methodology is used, allowing the site to innovate rapidly.
The fantastic theme was created entirely by Mike as a Zen sub-theme.
Thank you for the Community input toward new OSM board members
Shortly before christmas 2009 Ole wrote a blog asking the community for your input related the new OSM board members which the CoC needs to elect in February 2010. With the call "Community input needed - choosing new OSM board members" we started something new. Non of us in the CoC know what we will get as response or input. With more than 100 votes and 19 comments it is one of those blogs that got quite some attention. Some of the regional communities even posted a translation of the blog on their sites.
What is really positive is that in the 20 days from December, 22nd to January 12th we got 56 nominations. There are quite a number of old fellows and friends on this list but there are also some new names. Some people that nominated are from regional communities and normally not involved in our centralized website. I personally think this experiment was successful and we got a really positive feedback. Thank you all that have participated in the nomination, thank's to all the candidates showing interest and many thank's to everybody who helped sharing this effort with your regional communities.
Now you will ask what is next? The next step is a simple chat within the CoC. We will discuss the various nominations and might do a follow up with some of the candidates. We are interested to know those we suggest if we do not know them yet. Of course we will discuss our suggestions with the other teams of the project and get their opinion as well. In the end the CoC will elect the new board members for OSM. We plan the election before February, 15th in order to give OSM the new board members before their next meeting. So all these steps will be done in the next few days and weeks. And of course we will keep you posted about the decisions made.
For the moment I like to thank again the whole community of Joomla for this great combined effort and thank you for your understanding, that we now stick our heads together and might be a bit silent for the next few days. You gave us quite some homework to be done ;-).
Video: Bargento 3 Wrap Up
Bargento 3 took place on Monday November 9th in Paris, France and all the attendees were treated to a great event with a great turnout, with over 300 retailers, partners and community members attending.
The French community just released this video wrap up of Bargento 3 and has already started to plan for Bargento 4--so make sure to keep those passports handy!
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