Open Source News

Gift That Give on Magento

Greetings Magento Community,

Magento Answers is shaping up to be a powerful tool which is not surprising considering the awesome community we have behind it. We currently receive a pretty steady flow of questions and receive Answers from moderators, community members, and Magento staff. We've even extended Magento Answers networking through both Twitter and Facebook to share information with our local networks. Considering the amount of activity, it only seemed right to ask one of our most trusted community members to help manage, answer and shape the direction of our new Answers tool.

I'd like to formally introduce you to Rico Neitzel. Rico has long been a part of the Magento Ecosystem. He's a Magento evangelist and Community Manager from Germany. Rico helped to build the strong success within our German Community. Together with Netresearch, they began the first Magento Event ever "Meet Magento". He is also responsible for the German Locale package with big support from Daniel Sasse. Additionally, Rico is one of our international trainers for Magento U-which offers training courses to help you build and grow your business with Magento.

I'm very excited to have Rico join us on Magento Answers. With his vast Magento knowledge and experience - he will be a huge asset to our Answers community.

Please join me in welcoming Rico and look for him on Magento Answers -- now with an official Magento Team Badge!

This is a final reminder for those that would like to sign up for part 1 of our Theming in Magento Go webinar series. We hope you can join us for this exciting event.

Webinar: Theming in Magento Go (Part 1)

Magento Go has a powerful templating system that allows you to fully control the look and feel of your online store. To make it easy for you to make the changes you want, Magento Go provides a set of easy-to-use design editors that help you to set up and customize your store right from the Admin Panel, without editing any code. But for more advanced web designers, you can also create custom CSS files to control your store’s formatting directly to achieve the exact look you want. This webinar will provide a great starting point to launch your store. We hope you’ll join us for this exciting event; here are the details:

Date: July 20, 2011 9:00 AM PDT

Presenter: Kara Heinrichs, Magento U Instructor and Mosses Akizian, Product Marketing Manager

In this webinar, attendees will learn:

• Components of a theme in Magento Go
• How to select a theme
• How to change the logo and favicon
• How to change colors, images and fonts
• How to change page layouts
• How to turn on and off blocks
• How to change the text in your theme

Register now

Finis on Magento

iOSDevCamp 2011

Last weekend the folks at PayPalx invited me to iOSDevCamp and what an amazing experience it was. If you aren't aware, PayPal hosts this annual event where developers gather together and spend three days developing applications for iOS and competing for awesome prizes.

Photo by Adam Tow

I was amazed watching these developers. Some came in groups, and some never met before camp. Still, they created these great apps in less than three days in some cases. You could see them coding into the wee hours and on occasion, sleeping in the lobby back at the hotel. That's commitment!

There were many very interesting and creative applications created, but one of my absolute favorites was the BeeLine Reader which is a new technology designed to help people read faster by applying a color gradient to the text to reduce line transition errors. Never lose your place again! No electronic reading device should be without this. Check out all the demos here.

Would you like to learn more about iOSDevCamp? Check out their website, and check out the conversation on twitter. There's also a great stream of images you can find on the X.Commerce Flickr stream.

One of the best parts about being invited to iOSDevCamp was being able to connect some of the great folks who work within the PayPal and X.Commerce community. Many thanks to Perinne Crampton, Sudha Jamthe, Praveen Alavilli, and Myrna Rivera for making me feel so welcome.

Where's Rhonda? See if you can find me, check out the picture above. You'll find me sporting my black Magento Staff hoodie!

Leading training workshops on mapping skills for organizers

Understanding spatial data and how to design visualizations is becoming easier for non-specialists with the latest mapping software. This is exciting - almost everyone who works with data will encounter situations when mapping it is critical to understanding trends, making sense of complexity, or pinpointing locations. But skills alone are often not enough, it's the whole workflow that matters. This summer we are creating a robust curriculum to teach mapping skills with the whole workflow in mind.

We will be using this curriculum in two upcoming workshops we are leading for the New Organizing Institute (NOI), part of their upcoming Advanced Data trainings happening in Berkeley, CA July 24 to 30 and in Washington, DC August 21 - 27. (Last we heard there were a few spaces left. If you're interested, contact Josh Wolf at josh@neworganizing.com.)

The workshops will walk through in detail how to use TileMill to design and share custom maps, but will begin by covering GIS basics, tools for processing data like QuantumGIS, and tools for working with tabular data like Google Refine. We hope that people will leave with not only a good understanding on how to make beautiful custom maps, but also how to clean up and best utilize their data.

Here is a quick look at training curriculum. We'll be posting parts of this to support.mapbox.com as we further develop it, along with other articles that sketch out the workflows for mapping that we find most powerful.

If you're interested in a training like this not tailored to organizers, please contact us at info@mapbox.com for more information.

A Webinar Presented by Groove Commerce and Magento
Getting Social With Magento

During this webinar we will examine the importance of integrating social media into your eCommerce website to increase conversion rates and drive sales

• Create a social shopping experience that entices users to share their purchases with friends and family
• Implement a coordinated and strategic effort between your social media presence and your Magento store
• See what Groove Commerce is doing with clients in order to use their social media presence with their Magento websites
• Learn best practices, and common mistakes, seen in developing and deploying a social strategy

Date/Time: Wednesday, July 27, 2011, 11:00 AM (PDT)
Registration: http://info.magento.com/webinar-July-27-2011.html

Use MapQuest or Google Maps to bring street level data to your map

We recently added the option to display a street level layer below your custom map layers when using TileStream Hosting. With this new feature, it’s now easy to make custom maps that have detailed street level data at deep zoom levels without having to gather and style street data on your own. Instead, you can focus on designing custom overlay layers in TileMill with your own data, and use existing street level layers.

Using the TileStream embed builder, you can turn the street level layer on with a single click, allowing for it to be used for a single layer map or complex composited maps.

To create this map I took a custom point overlay that we designed in TileMill for the DC nonprofit A Wider Circle and enabled the street level layer.

Node.js, evaluating your tech strategy, and happy hours this week in Washington, DC

Today kicks off not only a scorching heat wave, but also a great week of technology events happening in the city. The weeks starts with a Node.js meetup tonight and goes on to include happy hours, discussions on evaluating your external communications and overall technology strategy, and a two day deep dive on learning and using Drupal. Below are our event picks for the week, and you can find a full calendar at DC Tech Events. Have a great week!

Monday, July 18

7:00 - 10:00 pm

NodeDC Meetup: Want to know more about Node.js, the technology behind our fast data visualization and mapping tools? Come out for the inaugural NodeDC meetup. Presentations will include an intro to Node.js, using nvm and npm in your development environment, and a demo of the requisitioner module, and there will be lots of time for conversations before and after. We're excited to be hosting this event in our garage.

Tuesday, July 19

7:00 pm

NetSquared: Where Are They Now?: NetSquared regularly hosts strategy sessions to give specific nonprofits advice on how to improve their web presence. This meetup will look at how effective that advice is, bringing in several people who have taken this advice and tested it out at their organization to report back on what worked, what didn't, and what they learned from the process.

A Webinar Presented by Gorilla and Magento
Magento Community Users Get the Enterprise Advantage

Magento Gold Solution Partner, Gorilla, will discuss the numerous benefits that Magento Enterprise brings to existing Magento community-based eCommerce channels.

• Case study about a former Community user, their upgrade to Magento Enterprise and the benefits this business realized
• Gorilla's Sr. Magento Architects will walk through the steps necessary to plan, evaluate, execute, and test for an Enterprise upgrade
• Question and Answer session

Date/Time: Thursday, July 21, 2011, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM PDT
Registration: http://info.magento.com/webinar-July21-2011.html

Bargento took Paris and the online community by storm on June 20th and 21st, 2011. Cap 15, where the event was held, was filled with excitement as Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner kicked off the conference by discussing the eBay acquisition, and reiterating that “together [we] will build the future of e-commerce.” Yohan Ruso, the eBay French General Director, only added to the enthusiasm and buzz of Bargento with his comment that “participating in Bargento means to be connected with Magento.”

This event proved once again to the Magento community that Bargento is the event to attend in Paris. Bargento attracted 700 visitors, and hosted 24 workshops and 8 speaker presentations--giving each visitor the opportunity to learn about the advantages of the solution, how to optimize sales, and hear from others who specialize in Magento.

Magento Partners had an additional chance to meet with Magento's sales and executive team in Paris at the Solution Partner Summit. Here, the Partners learned about new resources and worked with the Magento team to create a plan that will support and facilitate the rapid growth that we've seen in that past year.

Thank you to Philippe Humeau and his team for putting together such a successful event!

For an insider’s look at Bargento 2011, check out the video below.

Over the past 30 days, members of the Magento executive and sales team traveled to Paris, London, Copenhagen, Germany, and the Netherlands for Partner Summits, where they with met over 60 Magento Solution Partners.

At each summit, everyone came with the same goal in mind— to work collaboratively to develop a plan to drive the best in class products and service offerings that will support the rapid growth that we have all experienced over the past year. With this as our goal, we listened to our Partners ideas for improvements, as well as shared our own.

We came away from each summit impressed by the substantial growth of our partners' businesses and their ongoing success. There were common themes, such as the growing Magento demand and success with larger enterprise customers, compliments about our support group's growth and communications, interest and excitement about the eBay announcement, and at the same time a sense that partners have forged strong and lasting relationships with other partners in their own country.

We are using what we learned from these summits to expand the resources used to support our Solution Partners, develop a greater demand for Magento, and improve Partner sales and technical competency.

Needless to say, we surpassed our initial goal, and this round of meetings proved to be more successful and valuable than we expected.

Keep a lookout for a Solution Partner Summit near you!

Looking forward to talking about OpenStreetMap and what's to come

The State of the Map EU, OpenStreetMap’s bi-annual conference, takes place this weekend (July 15- 17) in Vienna, Austria, and I’ll be there all three days to learn and talk about our mapping work. The conference schedule looks amazing, and it will be fun to participate in the incredible momentum of the OpenStreetMap community.

I’m especially excited about attending this conference because OpenStreetMap is such a vital part of our work. We use its data in many of the maps we create for public use on MapBox.com, and in maps like this one of Vienna.

I made this map using our open source map design studio TileMill, which makes it easy to create custom maps with just about any data you have — including OpenStreetMap data. If you’re at State of the Map and are interested in TileMill, be sure to find me for a demo of how to make custom maps with TileMill and host and share them with TileStream.

I’ll also be tweeting from the event at @kkaefer.

.ts-map img {border:none!important;padding:0!important;}#ts-embed-1310212152959 {background:#357;}

Have you ever wanted to contribute back to Rails? This is the opportunity you've been looking for. We're organizing a Rails 3.1 Hackfest on the weekend of July 23rd and 24th!!!

GOAL

The goal of this event is to have Rails 3.1 as the most stable version as possible. So, in this event we will focus on working on 3-1-stable branch of the project.

HOW

In order to achieve this we encourage you to:

• Upgrade your existing apps to Rails 3.1 and report any existing issue if it doesn't already exist
• Test your favorite plugins/gems with Rails 3.1 and report any existing issue if it doesn't already exist
• Review all the open issues and pull requests
  • Check if issues can be reproduced
  • If so provide as many details as possible (for example it's important for us to know which Rails version/s are affected. They could be 2-3-stable, 3-0-stable, 3-1-stable or master)
  • If it's not possible to reproduce the issue, add a comment on github issue tracker indicating that
• Provide test cases and patches for 3-1-stable blockers only (blockers will be tagged as 'blocker')
  • Follow the contributing to Ruby on Rails guide
  • Try to provide a failing test case (if you can't figure out the whole solution)
  • Try to provide a full patch (tests, code and docs if needed)
• Write documentation (guides, API), you can push modifications directly to docrails
• Write blog posts about your experience using 3.1

Please note that since we are on the release candidate already, only patches for blocking issues will be accepted.

WHO

From the core team: Aaron Patterson (tenderlove), Xavier Noria (fxn) and Santiago Pastorino (spastorino), and the core contributors: Damien Mathieu (dmathieu), Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) and Josh Kalderimis (joshk) will be around, so don't hesitate to ask whatever questions you may have.

WHEN

The weekend of July 23rd and 24th, 2011

WHERE

On IRC:

Server: irc.freenode.net Channel: #rails-contrib

In real life:

What could be better than gathering together in real life and hacking (and drinking?) on the weekend!? It's the best chance to get together and getting into the depth of Rails core. Contact your friends, your boss, your co-workers, and get them organized!

These are the places that have confirmed the gathering:

• Montevideo, Uruguay: WyeWorks
• Boston, MA: thoughtbot, inc
• Chicago, IL: Hashrocket
• Toronto, ON: Toronto Ruby Brigade
• Bangalore, India: CastleRock Research
• Boulder, CO: Boulder Ruby user group
• New York, NY: NYC on Rails
• New York, NY: Pivotal Labs
• Lehi, UT: Utah Ruby User Group
• San Francisco, CA: MochaLeaf, Inc.
• Portland, OR: SweetSpot Diabetes Care
• Dayton, OH: Littlelines
• Honolulu, HI: Aloha.rb
• Vineland, NJ: South Jersey Rails Group
• San Francisco, CA: Heroku
• Los Angeles, CA: Ruby/Rails Meetup Group
• Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil: RubyonRio
• Austin, TX: GameSalad
• Boulder, CO: Pivotal Labs
• Porto, Portugal: Geekslab
• Durham, NC: Relevance, Inc.
• Ottawa, ON: Shopify

Keep watching this list as it continues to grow. See you on 23rd!

Magento racked up record-breaking sales results in the 2nd Quarter of 2011 and made substantial progress on enhancing our product line, support and training. The quarter’s biggest news was the announcement that eBay has agreed to acquire Magento and make it a core component of the new X.commerce ecosystem.

Below are highlights of a quarter that marked the beginning of a new era for Magento and eCommerce.

Q2 Revenues Grow by 140% lead by Enterprise Edition

Rapid growth in customer subscriptions for the Magento Enterprise Edition helped drive 2nd quarter revenue growth of 140% vs. 2nd quarter 2010. In addition, the recently-created Customer Success Group and expanded Support Team were instrumental in driving record-high renewal rates for the Enterprise Edition. In this quarter we also experienced a remarkable renewal rate of 92% from Magento Enterprise Edition subscribers who have chosen to stay with Magento year over year as their businesses have evolved.

This also marked the first full quarter of Magento Go revenues, which made a significant contribution to the company’s overall revenue growth.

eBay Agrees to Acquire Magento

On the morning of June 6th, we announced that Magento had reached an agreement to be acquired by eBay Inc. The pending acquisition – scheduled to close in the 3rd quarter – will enable Magento to accelerate our growth and extend our reach as part of eBay Inc.’s X.commerce platform. In the weeks since the announcement, customers, partners, developers and merchants have gained a better understanding of how the pending acquisition will help strengthen Magento and provide even greater opportunities for our ecosystem.

Magento Answers Launched

In May, we introduced Magento Answers, the latest addition to our web site’s portfolio of collaboration tools. Magento Answers is a simple yet powerful tool for exchanging ideas with other merchants, developers and eCommerce pros through an intuitive question and answer format. Not surprisingly, the Magento community has jumped right in, making this a “go to” resources for finding expert advice. We’ve gotten great feedback from the community and have already made improvements to Magento Answers based on user suggestions.

Solution Partner Network Continues Aggressive Expansion

Choosing the right Solution Partner is key to the successful deployment of most large, robust Magento projects. That’s why we continue to build our global network of Solution Partners. We added 39 new Solution Partners in Q2, bringing the total to 271. Significantly, 27 of these are Gold or Silver level partners, capable of delivering larger, robust projects for customers. In fact, we’ve more than doubled the total number of Gold and Silver Solution Partners in the past year.

Magento Go: Going Strong

Magento Go continued to build marketplace momentum and attract merchants in its first full quarter of operation. The development team continued to enhance Magento Go with new features and updates, including support for multiple payment gateways in North America, Europe and Asia, and the ability to add on themes and pre-integrated technologies from our partners. You can find great examples of Go-powered sites at TrendyBelly (maternity clothing), Jules Seltzer (classic and contemporary furniture) and Dog Geeks (eco-conscious dog products).

Meanwhile, work continues at full speed on the Magento Go Platform, currently in closed Beta – watch for exciting announcements in the 3rd quarter.

Other Product Updates

Our development team moved forward on multiple fronts, preparing for 3rd quarter releases and plotting the longer-term future of the Magento platform. A few highlights:

• Magento Mobile: We added several capabilities to our mobile offering, including support for product reviews and social sharing via Facebook and Twitter. More than 15 new apps were launched on Magento Mobile in the 2nd quarter, with many more in the works for the months ahead. Check out an example of a new mobile app from Easton, available for iPhone, iPad and Android.
• Magento Enterprise & Magento Professional Editions: The core development team is in the final phases of testing the upcoming 1.11 releases, planned for 3rd quarter. Planned features include Minimum Advertised Price, comprehensive Return Merchandize Authorization (RMA), persistent shopping cart, wishlists and many more.
• Magento 2: Highlights of the 2nd annual Magento Developers Paradise in Ibiza, Spain included presentations by the Magento core team on the architecture work being done for Magento 2. The developers in attendance got a first-hand look at the some of the innovations that will help shape the next generation of Magento.

Rave Reviews for Magento U

Dozens of merchants, developers and designers took advantage of world-class training opportunities offered by Magento U, which just completed its first full quarter of classes. In the 2nd quarter, classes were held in Chicago, Berlin, London Los Angeles and Paris, with an even busier schedule of global course offerings planned for the 3rd and 4th quarters.

Feedback on the quality of Magento U instructors was particularly strong, with one student commenting, “Their through-and-through understanding of Magento and the inner workings of the application is truly amazing and something you just can't get anywhere else.”

Support Team Growth Yields Dramatic Results

Perhaps the most dramatic growth of all during the 2nd quarter occurred in the area of Magento Support. Demand – measured by the number of support tickets – grew by 300% vs. the same period one year ago, thanks to the rapid expansion of our Enterprise Edition customer base. Fortunately, the Support Team’s size grew by even more than 300% over that period. Performance improved as well: the team achieved a 40% reduction in average time to resolution, and a 90% increase in first call resolution for Enterprise Edition customers.

Outlook for 3rd Quarter

The 3rd quarter shows every indication of being another breakthrough period for Magento. Projected highlights include:

• Closing of the eBay acquisition
• Continued triple-digit sales growth
• Release of Magento Enterprise Edition 1.11 and Magento Professional Edition 1.11
• Continued expansion of Support Team and Magento U offerings
• And much, much more

As always, stay tuned to the Magento Blog for updates.

Discussing open data strategies and showing how to map open data using TileMill

Yesterday's Open Government Partnership meeting at the U.S. Department of State brought government officials, civil society organizations, and implementers together to discuss their efforts working to make governments around the world more transparent and participatory. Eric, Dave, and I attended the meeting to participate in Innovation Alley, an exhibit showing technology and methodologies that can be used to improve open government, and to discuss strategies for releasing and using open data, which is a focal point of the State Department's initiative.

We also showed how maps and data visualizations built using open source mapping tools from MapBox make it possible to reveal patterns and tell stories with open data.

We had fun showing off what is possible with open data and open source mapping tools, such as how we mapped a natural disaster - the Japan earthquake - using open U.S. government data, the community served by a local NGO using their operational data and open data from the DC government, and just how quickly millions of Census tracts run on our maps. Even with unruly data sets, slow internet connections, and tight budgets, MapBox tools make it possible to build beautiful, fast maps.

Map border tilesets use World Bank's open data to provide labels in five languages

Continuing with our effort to provide more options for mapmakers to take advantage of TileStream’s new compositing feature, today we are releasing five new transparent world borders tilesets. The data used to create these borders comes from the World Bank and provides world country names in five different languages: English, French, Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese.

The country names in each language are provided by the World Bank’s open data API, available with a generous terms of use.

.ts-map img {border:none !important;}

World Bank Arabic, composited over Natural Earth.

These maps are available as MBTiles downloads from MapBox.com, or to TileStream Hosting customers as shared maps from the MapBox account.

In case you had not heard, Joomla 1.7 will be released on July 19, 2011. This is the first release under Joomla's new 6-month release schedule.

1. Should I update my Joomla 1.6 site to Joomla 1.7?

Absolutely you should. In fact, you must. Joomla 1.6 will reach the end of its life in August 2011, just a month away. After that, Joomla 1.6 will have no further security updates, meaning that if a security problem is discovered, it will not be addressed. And that means if your site is hacked due to a 1.6 vulnerability, you will have no recourse to fix the site, other than to move it to 1.7 anyway. You might as well move it sooner than later!

Oh, and upgrading from 1.6 to 1.7 is designed to be a very simple, one-click process.

We’ve Improved our Search

Search is one of the most useful functions on the Magento Answers site so we’ve made some improvements and we’ve made the search results more relevant. Begin by simply typing in either keywords, topics or a question into the Answers search bar. As you type, the search generates a list of items related to those words. It’s never been easier to see whether or not your question is being already being discussed.

So think of that burning questions you’ve been dying to get answered and check out Magento Answers. We’ve got awesome folks answering really challenging questions everyday! If you don’t believe us, check out some of the answers from our most valued (and voted up) sources: Magento ECG, Osyris, and Thebod

Happy Searching!

The OSCON Data Innovation Award will honor a person, project or company that's made a significant contribution to the data management field. Nominations are due by July 18.