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.
FROM THE MAGENTO TWITTER FEEDNOW AVAILABLE
The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
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.
+++
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!
FROM THE MAGENTO TWITTER FEEDNOW AVAILABLE
The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
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
FROM THE MAGENTO TWITTER FEEDNOW AVAILABLE
The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
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!
FROM THE MAGENTO TWITTER FEEDNOW AVAILABLE
The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
Join 2010 PBworks A-team
The A-Team is a group of outspoken PBworks users who test out our newest features and let us know what they think. This year we’re looking for a few more people to join the team.
This is a great chance for you to look under the hood at what we’re developing and affect the way it works.
Alpha Team feedback is extremely important. The 2009 A-Team informed many, many decisions about which features were too crazy for prime-time and which features would work for our customers.
This offer is open to experienced PBworks users who feel comfortable testing out features that don’t exactly work, have bugs and may break. None of the alpha team features should be used on client facing workspaces!
If you want to try the latest features, find the problems, and tell us what we should improve upon – sign up for the PBworks Alpha Team
The first round of features begins this week!
Video: Magento Enterprise Editions Rich Merchandising Suite
Magento Enterprise Edition features a powerful Rich Merchandising Suite which allows you to define customer segments to optimize your marketing initiatives. Effectively target merchandise at specific segments and personalize the shopping experience for your customers.
Learn more in this video and on the Magento Enterprise Edition page and check out this very powerful feature for yourself in the Magento Demo. You can also see a demonstration of the Magento Rich Merchandising Suite in the Webinar Archive.
FROM THE MAGENTO TWITTER FEEDNOW AVAILABLE
The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
Announcing Magento Enterprise Edition Version 1.7
The Magento team is excited to announce the new version 1.7 release of our Magento Enterprise Edition eCommerce platform. The new release includes many key improvements, enhancements and innovative features which will continue to empower your eCommerce vision and goals. These new features include the Magento Reward Points System, highly tuned page performance through Full Page Caching, as well as many other key administrative functionality improvements.
New Features in Enterprise Edition Version 1.7
Magento Enterprise Edition version 1.7 features the all new reward points system, which allows merchants to implement unique programs designed to enhance user experience and increase customer loyalty. Points are awarded based on purchases, as well as actions such as registering on the site, inviting others to register, submitting product reviews and tags and more. Points are managed by customers through their account and are redeemable at checkout time towards the price of a purchase. To learn more, you can also watch a screencast demonstration of the new Reward Point system.
Magento Enterprise Edition version 1.7 also places a focus on highly tuned page performance by making use of Full Page Caching. Forrester Research has recently hailed caching as the “best practice” behind some of the internet’s fastest sites and new performance optimizations included in this version of Magento Enterprise Edition provide significant benefits for merchants of all sizes through a new Full Page Caching module. The optimizations, which together with other performance-enhancing functionality already in Magento, significantly reduce page load times, increase conversions, and enhance the customer browsing experience.
Additionally, Magento Enterprise Edition version 1.7 included no less than fifteen new features available to store administrator users to help augment the range of tools administrators have at their disposal for managing their site. These include such features as 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.
Learn More and Join Us for a Webinar Presenting the New Features
More information is available via the Press Release. You can also read more about the exciting new features by visiting the Magento Enterprise Edition page and scrolling through to the new features. We’ve also put together an information sheet (PDF) and which you can download, read and share with others--so make sure to download the Magento Feature List.
Additionally, we have scheduled an informative webinar highlighting and demonstrating these new features on Wednesday, January the 27th at 9AM PST (Los Angeles/GMT -8). We would like to offer members of the community the opportunity to gain priority access to this webinar by clicking the following link to sign up and register: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/151801883
FROM THE MAGENTO TWITTER FEEDNOW AVAILABLE
The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
Magento Spotting: Personalized/Custom Configured Products Roundup
Lima Drupal Meetup + Techniques Used by Grassroots Mapping Project for Settlement Mapping
Talking mapping and testing out using kites to take aerial photos to be converted into maps and shape files
There were over 30 people at the Lima, Peru Drupal meetup this weekend, where I had the chance to present on mapping in Drupal. Specifically I talked about our open source MapBox service and how its custom maps can be used on Drupal websites, and on how maps like these are used on Managing News, our Drupal based news and data aggregator.
Jeff Warren from MIT Media Lab's Design Ecology group also talked about mapping at the meetup, explaining how to make maps of areas that haven't yet been mapped and how to do this without access to a satellite. Jeff is currently working on a Grassroots Mapping project in the informal settlement of Villa El Salvador in the Southern cone of Lima, where he's working with the community to create maps using aerial photography to be used for planning and development purposes. Conventional methods can be prohibitively expensive, whereby grassroots methods can achieve the same result for a much lower cost.
Week in DC Tech: January 18th Edition
Haiti, service, activism, and tech this week in Washington, DC
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day! If you happen to have off today, there are service events happening throughout the city that you can participate in - the DCist lists a few of them here. There are also quite a few Haiti fundraising events taking place this week. We Love DC has a good list of the big ones, and be sure to check out the comments for others.
And of course there are some interesting technology events happening. Below is a look at the ones that caught our eye, and a full list can be found over at DC Tech Events. Have a great week!
Monday, January 189:00 am - Noon
MLK Day Peace Walk: If you're not working today or off at one of the many service events happening throughout the city, you can celebrate Martin Luther King day by walking for peace. The walk starts at the 2500 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, heads south on South Capitol Street, and ends at the Covenant Baptist Church in the 3800 block of South Capitol Street.
Autism therapy site with autotagging and GeoIP-enabled directory
Healing Thresholds Autism Therapy provides comprehensive therapy fact sheets, daily updates of research and news, and a global directory of autism therapists. The site has become a standard and definitive source for autism treatment information. In particular, the site provides layperson-accessible summaries of essentially all child-focused research from the last 3 years, in addition to earlier seminal papers.
The two biggest challenges of the site have been to expose all of the deep content we've authored and to monetize it. We have over 2000 carefully-written research and news summaries and user-generated content. We also have over 1000 taxonomy terms, and we've authored detailed definitions for nearly half.
Our redesign last month upgraded the three-year-old Drupal 4.7-based site to Drupal 6. More importantly, we used the flexibility of Drupal to completely re-architect how users find and interact with our content. Where previously we had separate sections of research and news, our new tabbed interface displays -- in a search engine friendly fashion -- all of the relevant content for each of over 1000 different therapy topics.
Tiki 3.4 LTS now available
CakePHP 1.3.0-beta has landed
Support PBworks at Enterprise 2.0
This year the team at PBworks is in the running to present at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. We’re need your support – please take a second and Vote for us here!
Thanks to all the folks who have already voted and left comments like:
Love working with pbworks with my management consulting clients and my family! – David Purdy
PBWORKS is great software – been using if for more than 2 years! It makes our organization work – could not live without it! – Roger Rydberg
The Enterprise 2.0 conference is the best place for companies to learn how emerging technology can improve on the current legacy systems that are eating away at the productivity, efficiency and mental balance of everyday employees.
Last year we were excited to host a booth and announce our new live editing and voice conferencing capability . These new features make it easy for the non-technical person to host remote presentations, share their screen and set up conference calls. (With nothing to download and no additional set up cost!)
This year we’re excited to participate once again. Thanks for helping us make that happen!