Over the past two weeks we’ve introduced you to some of our successful Magento Go merchants: David Bandrowski of The Deering Banjo Company and Kirshan Murphy of Inked Magazine are prime examples of merchants who have used Go to build better online businesses.

This week’s story may be the sweetest one yet. Arline Conigliaro of Imperial Cookies discusses her experience of working with a professional web designer to create a beautiful site that reflected her brand's image. Even without advanced technological skills, Arline finds it easy to print reports, fulfill orders, ship her cookies and run a successful online bakeshop.

Bob Schwartz here from the NRF 101st Annual Convention & EXPO floor at the Javits Center in NYC.

It is very interesting for me to see the change over the years in the content around eCommerce and multi-channel at NRF’s BigShow.  Way back In 1998, I was speaking on a Keynote panel at the NRF Convention as Head of eCommerce for NORDSTROM Inc’s new internet group. The questions at that time focused on cannibalization, channel conflicts, talent and technology costs. My panel on eCommerce was more of a novelty at NRF in 1998. We have seen eCommerce and multi-channel become a bigger part of the NRF Convention content In recent years, yet this year is different.  In 2012, eCommerce, mobile devices, social and the ways in which technology is drastically reshaping retail are a core part of the NRF content schedule.  I couldn’t agree more with this emphasis, since solving for these issues will quickly separate the retail winners from the losers over the next several years.

One topic that is of high interest is “social.” Social is quickly becoming a fundamental core influence on of the way people make purchasing decisions.  But what is social shopping exactly? Is there more to it than Facebook “Likes” and Tweets? How do I utilize social shopping to drive my business? How do I keep up with the almost daily changes in this rapidly evolving technology? I’m excited to be speaking on this topic today as part of the panel  “Social Shopping: Mobility, Social Media and Personalized Services.” We’ll be discussing what retailers should know about social shopping to make the most out of this emerging channel. If you’re at the show make sure to stop by the panel at 3:15pm in Hall A, 1A 10/12. Hope to see you there!

Partners galardonados por ayudar a los clientes a conseguir resultados de negocio reales mediante el ERP ágil de Openbravo

Hi everybody -

Hope you all had a great holiday, and are easing into 2012 nicely! I'll cut right to the chase with this announcement: effective pretty well immediately (as this has been in the works for a little while now), I'm stepping down as Documentation Co-lead.

Awwww, sad, I know! It's been quite the experience, and I feel like along with Jennifer and the other docs enthusiasts, we've gotten a lot done over the course of the last year and a bit of official leadership term. It's been great helping set the direction of the documentation plans, and working with everyone who's been interested in improving the documentation, as well as many of the core and contrib development teams.

After taking some time off in the summer to decompress and figure out where I wanted to go with all of this, I realized that despite feeling like I've been effective in the position, it's taken a lot of my time away from other things in my life, and from actually writing docs and working on other areas of Drupal. And that was definitely okay for a certain timeframe, but it's not something I want to do forever. Now that the Community Documentation infrastructure changes have been rolled out, my side of the leadership role is effectively being put on hiatus. We've talked this over with Dries, and he also feels it's fine for Jennifer to continue managing the API docs and infra solo.

What does this mean to you all? Probably not any huge changes, I'll still poke my head in on the issue queue, IRC, etc. now and then. But my "official responsibilities" will no longer exist, including hosting Documentation sprints, attending meetings and docs hour, doing docs conference sessions, etc. And when I do work on Docs, it'll more often be in a writing/editing capacity. I'm also hoping to spend some more time doing other fun things like patch reviews for Drupal core, and continuing to attend Drupal events. ...And also, spending more time knitting, socializing, doing yoga, and all those other things I neglected while I was spending all my evenings online!

My time helping lead the project's documentation team has had high points and low points, but overall I feel like I've learned a ton, gotten a lot done, and am leaving the state of the docs in a better place than when I started. That's really all I could hope for! Thanks so much to Jennifer for being an amazing co-lead with whom to share a brain, and to all the fantastic Drupal and docs enthusiasts who've made this experience a positive one.

I hope to see the tentative docs infrastructure plans come to fruition during the coming year. This will result in a small team of dedicated core docs maintainers (including myself) taking over the helm of the future "curated" core docs section, and also see docs maintainers appointed for other contrib projects' curated documentation. And of course, work on API documentation and docs infrastructure will continue; Jennifer and other team members have been focused on this for a while now.

Keep rocking the docs folks, thanks for everything, and I will see you around!

-------------

Jennifer here... I'd like to thank Ariane for a great year of co-leadership! I'm currently planning on staying on as Documentation Team Leader for 2012.

What I'd like to do is take on a deputy leader or co-leader sometime soon (watch http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team for details and an official call for interest/applications). This way we can have a smooth transition to the next documentation leader, and start the trend of time-limited leadership for positions like this in the Drupal community (to prevent burn-out, let new people have a chance to lead, etc.). Anyway, rest assured I'll still be asking Ariane for advice and help, and I'm excited that she's still excited about being involved in documentation in her new capacity!

A Webinar Presented by eBridge Connections and Magento
Accounting Integration for eCommerce Success

We invite you to discover eBridge and how to leverage integrated solutions for Magento eCommerce stores. If you've looked at our integration solutions in the past, we encourage you to attend as there have been significant advances in what we have to offer.

Solution Highlights:

• No per-document or per-character transaction fees
• No manual data entry
• Unlimited volume of transactions

Not only will we educate you on the recent enhancements and capabilities of our online integration platform, we will also provide a live demo of the product in action! Here's a brief overview of what will be covered:

Agenda:

• About eBridge & Magento
• Magento Accounting Integration Demo
• Wrap up + Q&A

Date/Time: Tuesday, January 17, 2011 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM PDT

We’re about to open the floodgates! That is, Early Bird registration for Imagine 2012 begins January 18th. We’re offering Early Bird tickets at the same low price as last year – just $795 (compared to our standard ticket price of $1,195).

Don’t miss out on a chance to get (and save on) coveted tickets to what’s been called the “Super Bowl of eCommerce.” Last year we sold out early, with over 650 people from 27 countries attending our inaugural conference. And 250 more found themselves on the waiting list, unable to get in. One ticket even sold on eBay for hundreds of dollars over face value.

Demand is expected to be even greater for this year’s exclusive event, taking place April 23rd – 25th in Vegas, baby! Just off the strip at the luxurious M Resort, Imagine will feature industry thought-leaders talking technology and business, offer invaluable network connections, and let you be the first to find out what’s coming down Magento’s powerful product pipeline. Plus, need we mention, Magento throws some great parties!

Just ask anyone who attended last year’s event. Of the attendees surveyed, 100% agreed that the Imagine eCommerce Conference was worth their time and investment. And 99% of them would recommend Imagine to colleagues. (The other 1% didn’t really like their colleagues).

To purchase Early Bird tickets to Imagine 2012 and book your hotel room, visit our site on January 18th. Tickets are LIMITED and will SELL OUT, so mark your calendar and sign up here to be reminded just before tickets go on sale!

January 25, 2012 I 10AM PST

Webinar: The Power of eBay!

Would you like to expand your Magento Go store to reach millions of eBay buyers? With M2E, a Magento Go extension, you can seamlessly connect your store with eBay's platform. It allows you to quickly and easily create and manage listings, synchronize stock levels and import eBay transactions and orders into your Go admin panel. The extension interacts with all 23 major eBay marketplaces and it is also possible to use the extension with multiple Go stores and eBay accounts. Get to know more about M2E with our next webinar. Here are the details:

Date: January 25, 2012 10:00 AM PST

Presenters: Paul Pidoprygora, CEO, ESS-UA, Alex Pidoprygora, Director of Marketing & Business Development, ESS-UA and Mosses Akizian, Product Marketing Manager, Magento

In this webinar, attendees will learn about:

• Why businesses need the M2E extension
• Who this extension is for
• What the extension offers
• Demonstration of M2E

Register now

Last week, TechCrunch announced the finalists for the 2011 Crunchies. We’re thrilled to report that of the 5 Finalists in the Best Shopping Application, 2 are Magento Enterprise customers!

We’re proud (but not surprised) that Magento is so well represented amongst this elite group of nominees. Our merchants value innovation and love to create unique shopping experiences for their customers. Magento Enterprise provides the platform for innovation and creativity; our amazing merchants do the rest.

We offer our congratulations to Birchbox and Warby Parker – as well as all of the 2011 Crunchies Finalists – on their nominations. And we encourage all of you to visit the Crunchies website and cast your vote today!

Following the enthusiastic response to our initial On-Demand course offerings – launched in October of 2011 – we’re launching another course and making it available free, on-demand to Magento customers and community members.

“Managing Your Magento Store - Part 2: Product Marketing” is geared to Magento store owners. The course offers practical information that will also help merchandisers, product marketing managers, customer service and operations management and staff who work with Magento. Topics covered within Product Marketing will include merchandising, product management, brand management, and driving traffic on-site and off-site.

This is the second in a 3-part video training series designed to empower merchants toward self-management of their Magento store. Part 1: Catalog Management – has been enthusiastically received, and is also available free, on-demand.

Visit the Magento U website to learn more about Magento U courses and to register for “Managing Your Magento Store - Part 2.

We are excited to announce the availability of Magento CE Version 1.6.2.0 Stable for download and upgrade.

Some of the key improvements in this release include:

• Refactored indexing process
• Implemented localized PayPal settings for Japan

To see the full list of features and fixed issues please visit our release notes page. Diff files are available here.

Please Note: We do NOT recommend upgrading a production installation of Magento directly. Please backup database and all files before upgrading. Please make sure to check file permission before trying to upgrade through your Magento Connect Manager.

Please report all issues with this release in the bug tracker.

The Magento Go merchant success stories keep coming!

Last week, we introduced you to David Bandrowski of The Deering Banjo Company. This week we’re excited to share a video from another successful Magento Go merchant, Kirshan Murphy of Inked Magazine. From great flexibility and design to the easy to use WYSIWYG editor, Kirshan reveals which features of Magento Go were most instrumental in growing Inked Magazine’s bottom line.

Are you a Magento Developer in or around Spain that wants to take the Fundamentals of Magento Development course?

Now is your chance - we just added a special class in Barcelona from January 16-20!

This 40 hour course covers topics that range from an introduction to the architecture of Magento, to MVC and data models. Learn how to work with Magento modules, and how to customize and extend Magento to ensure the best upgrade path for the websites they extend.

A Webinar Presented by Orange Collar Media and Magento
Enhancing Magento with 3rd Party Integrations

Successfully executing 3rd party integrations with your Magento store can contribute significantly to the success of your online business.

Please join Gold Solution Partner, Orange Collar Media, for this webinar where you will learn about the:

• Ins and outs of drop shipping
• Order integration with real time reporting
• Working with 3rd party fraud detection companies
• Product data distributors

Date/Time: Wednesday, January 11, 2011 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PST

January 5, 2012 I 10AM PST

Webinar: Go Global with International Shipping

Do you currently sell to only United States based customers? Have you ever considered selling internationally? If so, our next webinar 'Go Global with International Shipping' is a must-see event. Shipping directly from the United States to other countries can be complex. Some of the common issues are it's too slow, too expensive, too risky, too confusing and not good for the customer experience. With our next webinar, you'll learn how to effectively Go Global without going bust. We hope you'll be able to join us; here are the details:

Date: January 5, 2012 10:00 AM PST

Presenters: Nate Gilmore, VP of Marketing & Business Development, Shipwire and Mosses Akizian, Product Marketing Manager, Magento

In this webinar, attendees will learn about:

• Outsourced shipping
• International expansion
• Tour of Shipwire

Register now

Magento Go was released in February of 2011 as the eCommerce solution for small merchants who wanted more out of their online stores. Over the past year we’ve been amazed at everything our merchants have been able to accomplish using the platform. As the momentum behind Magento Go continues to build, we decided to share some of our merchants’ success stories…in their own words. We’re excited to show you video testimonials of merchants who are using Magento Go to effectively build their online businesses.

Our first testimonial comes from David Bandrowski of The Deering Banjo Company. David sought out a different solution for Deering’s eCommerce business when the company’s previous platform wasn’t performing to their standards. Magento Go’s template system was the solution David was searching for and more. Here’s his story…

Start with sweet Vermont butter, fresh local cream and pure Belgian chocolate...craft ingredients into small batches of irresistible treats...then offer these treats to chocolate lovers everywhere. That’s Lake Champlain Chocolates’ recipe for success. Their premium products are available throughout the US at specialty food and gift stores, upscale hotels and inns and at three company-owned stores in Vermont.

When it came time for Lake Champlain Chocolates to update their website to keep pace with growth, Magento Enterprise was at the core of the solution.

Magento Solution Partner Grand River designed and implemented the new site, which delivers an upscale shopping experience that effectively conveys Lake Champlain Chocolates’ premium brand. Grand River implemented several customizations, including a checkout feature that enables shoppers to easily ship products to multiple addresses on multiple dates.

Double the Conversion, Double the Order Size

The new site doesn’t just make your mouth water; it also converts shoppers into buyers, as evidenced on Cyber Monday 2011. Lake Champlain Chocolates’ conversion that day reached 16.44%, more than twice their conversion rate on the same day a year earlier. Average order value doubled as well.

Sweet success indeed!

Have a Magento success story to share? Contact .

Jess (Drupal.org username xjm) is a Drupal developer, core contributor, module maintainer, and mentor, and just plain all-around awesome! She is a web developer for the University of Wisconsin's Department of Family Medicine. She also volunteers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.

Jess has made many contributions to Drupal, including roles as:

• maintainer of the Taxonomy Access Control and Taxonomy Lineage modules, among others.
• co-maintainer of the Taxonomy module in Drupal core.
• active participant in the API documentation clean-up sprint happening in Drupal 8, as well as efforts to clean up the entity system.
• co-lead of the Clean Up Core community initaitive.
• friendly and knowledgeable mentor to new contributors.
• organizer of the twice-weekly core office hours to help get new core contributors involved.
• inventor of the Issue summary initiative to give new contributors something very valuable but approachable as their first core contribution: reading through and summarizing long, difficult issues to help speed along their review and commit.

Sites she's built with Drupal include the UW Department of Family Medicine's public and intranet websites, an organizational knowledge base, and various small sites.

Jess attended her first DrupalCon in Chicago, and is coming to DrupalCon Denver as well, where she is planning to run an in-person core office hours sprint!

We asked Jess a few questions:

Tell us a bit about yourself! What is your background, or things that interest you outside Drupal?

I love the outdoors. I often bike 30 miles a day in the summer (that's 50 km for those of you using reasonable systems of measurement). I camp, hike, and do ecological restoration, and I probably can identify more plant species than you. ;) I also have other crunchy pastimes like gardening, cooking, and making candles. (I have not yet attempted to weave my own yogurt.)

I read a ridiculous number of books, and I speak bits of five foreign-to-me languages (though I can only carry on a conversation of any substance in French). I think General Relativity is awesome and I love mathematics and statistics.

I'm also a nerd. You probably got that already.

How and why did you start contributing to Drupal core?

I opened the 7.x-1.x branch of TAC with no knowledge of Drupal 7. 80% of TAC's upgrade from D6 was straightforward, but then I crashed headlong into the Field API and D7's entity form handling. I started asking a lot of questions, and catch was incredibly patient and helpful. I connected with someone in IRC who had a similar issue with entity forms, and we came to the conclusion that we needed a hook_field_widget_form_alter(), which did not yet exist in the API. We posted an issue for that, and before I'd finished my lunch, sun had written a patch for it.

Around then two things happened. First, the issue summary functionality was deployed on Drupal.org, and I saw a way that I could actually do something useful in the core queue in exchange for all the help I was getting. My hope was that issue summaries would widen the "review bottleneck" by saving reviewers and core committers time. I started writing an issue summary every day for major and critical core issues. Every summary I wrote also taught me something about Drupal.

A few days later, chx asked in IRC for someone to reroll a patch with a couple of minor fixes. I thought, hey, I can do that, and it ended up being my first core commit credit. For chx, who has written more of core than pretty much anyone, it would have been a triviality, but for me, it was the realization that I was actually capable of contributing, at least in a small way. That opened a door for me.

In the process of writing my once-a-day issue summaries, I came across some issues in subject areas I already understood well, so I worked on the patches as well as the summaries. Then I learned how to write automated tests for TAC, and consequently I was able to start contributing automated tests for core as well. The more issues I worked on, the more I understood, and the more I could do. Kind of an avalanche set off by a pebble, by the fact that people like catch and sun and chx took the time to be supportive and encouraging. So that's why I have my Drupal.org profile tagged with "full frontal nicety" (cr. webchick). Be nice. Go out of your way to be helpful and kind, because it can make all the difference to a budding contributor.

Can you explain some of the benefits of getting involved with the community and what you get out of it?

The best part is having co-ownership in the software that I use every day in my job. Being able to help resolve problems I encounter is very empowering, as is knowing where I can turn when I get stumped by something. It's also wonderful to collaborate with talented, engaging people from all over the world.

Now, if I were talking to my boss (hi Justin!), I'd emphasize that being actively involved in the project is good business strategy:

• Filing and participating in issues helps resolve real, production problems for our sites in maintainable ways.
• Contributing code back to the community means that there are thousands of other sites to help debug and test that code.
• Participating in discussions about Drupal core and contributed projects helps us make informed decisions.

What motivates you to help out others to get involved?

Two things:

1. For years, I was active in contributed module queues, but terrified of core. It took meeting a couple of friendly Acquianauts at DrupalCon Chicago to show me that core developers were actually completely approachable human beings. ;) So I'd like to extend that same realization to everyone else who might be in the same place I was.
2. Drupal 7's fantastic success also means that there are a lot more people using Drupal and filing issues. There's also a chronic shortage of experienced patch reviewers, which means issues that could well be fixed by an existing patch get stuck and languish. We as a community need to invest in connecting new contributors with the work they can do now.

What's your advice to new would-be contributors?

1. Join Drupal IRC channels. Lurk in #drupal-contribute.
2. Check out core office hours or the Novice queue.
3. Try your hand at contributing an issue summary. If you take the time to carefully read and understand an issue, you'll likely learn a lot about a particular topic, and also get a feel for how the community resolves issues and makes decisions.
4. Code is not the only way to contribute--not even for core. (Just today, a self-proclaimed "not a PHP nerd" unblocked a 4+ year old core issue by doing manual testing.)
5. When someone gives you feedback, embrace it! If code is your thing, learn to love the patch reviews you get. Even if all someone says is that a code comment is unclear, they're helping your patch move forward.
6. Pay attention to the feedback that experienced contributors give others, as well. You can learn a lot by watching what reviewers look for.
7. Above all, be patient and don't get discouraged! Sometimes it can take a long time and a lot of iterations for issues to be resolved. And, if you are unsure about anything, ask the nice folks in IRC.

What do you do with Drupal these days?

Well, it looks like I'm finally going to get to upgrade my department's sites to D7, which is a huge relief. I'm looking forward to experimenting with responsive frontend design and all the cool stuff I missed out on during a decade of supporting pixel-perfect IE6. (We finally decided to drop support this year.)

How did you get started in Drupal? What were your stumbling blocks, and what were the moments that things started to click?

The full version of that story requires a couple drinks, or possibly a therapist. However, I'll say that cowboy-coding a CMS with 2-3 others back in 2003 taught me the comparative value of open source projects, and that I picked Drupal for a client in 2006 primarily because the Drupal community seemed to be active and thriving.

The thing that stumped me the most in those first few months with Drupal 4.7 was probably access control; I spent weeks of testing and hacking trying to implement the permission scheme I wanted. (I installed TAC very briefly in D4.7... and uninstalled it as fast as I possibly could. I'm not sure if it's irony or fate that led to me maintaining it.) A few turning points for me were learning firsthand the bad things that could happen if I hacked core; the release of the Zen theme, which brightened my relationship with Drupal's frontend considerably; and my discovery of hook_nodeapi() and hook_form_alter(). Oh, and when I got over the idea that "I was a developer and knew how to write SQL" and realized that Views was pretty powerful. ;)

What's your favorite restaurant in Madison?

That might be the toughest question here, because we have a lot of amazing restaurants! In this context, I think the honor must go to Bradbury's, where I've written a whole lot of code, issue summaries, and so on; not to mention papers on topics ranging from the ecological history of Cherokee Marsh to the sociolinguistics of the distinction between Hindi and Urdu. (This is what happens when you go to college for over a decade.) Bradbury's has the best coffee in town, plus a rotating, seasonal menu of sweet and savory crêpes featuring local produce.

What would Linnaeus do?

Well, I'd love it if he could help me out with the Cyperaceae. If you think Drupal can be confusing, try identifying sedges sometime.

Anything else to add? :)

t5'''''''''''''''/
(This last contribution is from my cat Auri, who wisely considers my laptop to be her primary competitor for my attention.)

Know of anyone else doing awesome things in the community? Nominate them for Community Spotlight!

We are happy to announce the availability of Magento Preview Version CE 1.7.0.0-alpha1.

As this is a preview version it is NOT recommended in any way to be used in a production environment (more information about preview releases and the community edition release process can be found in this blog post). This release is available for upgrade through the Connect Manager, to download or via SVN.

Some of the new features and improvements in this release include:

• New and improved layered navigation price bucket algorithm
• Captcha functionality added to some of the forms
• Base prices based on customer groups
• Auto generation of multiple coupon codes for a price rule
• System backup and rollback functionality
• VAT ID Validation
• Support for DHL Europe
• Indexers refactoring
• Redesigned Mobile theme
• And much more...

To see a full list of features and fixed issues please visit our release notes page. Diff files are available here.

Please report all issues with this release in the bug tracker.

Have a Happy New eCommerce Year!!!

First Book is a nonprofit organization that provides new books to schools and programs serving children from low-income families. When First Book decided to make it easier for teachers and program leaders to find and buy the books they need, they turned to Magento Solution Partner 6th Street Commerce for help. 6th Street Commerce then created a customized eCommerce solution built with Magento Enterprise.

Results include improved navigation and search functionality and reduced overhead relating to managing orders, inventory and grants. Thanks to 6th Street Commerce and Magento Enterprise, First Book can serve more schools in need while stretching the impact of their partners' donations.

Find the whole story here.

Have a Magento success story you’d like to share? Contact .

Los proveedores de software libre comercial se asocian para ofrecer una IU avanzada a los usuarios de ERP en Oriente Medio