Magento is an open-source content management system for e-commerce web sites. The software was originally developed by Varien Inc., a US private company headquartered in Culver City, California, with assistance from volunteers.
Varien published the first general-availability release of the software on March 31, 2008, under the name Bento. Roy Rubin, former CEO of Varien, later sold a substantial share of the company to eBay, which is now the sole owner.
According to research conducted by aheadWorks in October 2014, Magento’s market share among the 30 most popular e-commerce platforms is about 30%.
Below you can see several of our posts about Magento, with topics ranging from uploading product images to Magento requirements, enabling a theme in Magento mobile, and ten easy fixes to Magento mistakes… We know, at this point you think we gave it all away. But not really. There is way more to know and learn about Magento than you may think.
Magento’s Unique Opportunities:
Well-Known E-Commerce Platform
Over 240 000 e-commerce owners worldwide use Magento as the primary e-commerce platform. In the impressive client list we can see companies like Nike, Olympus and Paul Smith. The platform is used by very large companies aswell as small entrepreneurs.
Magento Connect
Magento has a impressive market with all sorts of extensions / plugins. This makes it possible to purchase new functionality and hopefully easily implement in your own instance. This can save companies months of development. For us as a web agency we have saved countless of development hours thanks to the community at Magento connect. Sometimes we give back and published extensions at magento connect ourselves. You can see what people are writing about our work here.
Flexible and Powerful Platforms
Magento has a very intuitive administration area with extremely flexible and powerful tools for marketing, search engine optimization and product management. This makes it possible for e-commerce owners to customize the store to the specific needs. Its designed to be scalable and can be transformed into every need.
Magento announced a patch for a Magento Enterprise Security Vulnerability as many industry blogs published. Magento has informed all it’s Magento Enterprise customers about the security hole, but Magento has not posted anything on their blog.
Magento Enterprise Security Vulnerability
Magento has already a security patch reach for its Magento Enterprise Edition clients, which can be access on the account section on the Magento website under Support Patches. This security vulnerability affects all Magento versions prior to the just recently patched version 1.13.1.0 (every version from 1.6.0.0 through 1.13.0.2).
What does this Magento Enterprise Security Vulnerability mean to you?
The vulnerability is limited to Magento Enterprise only, and only to users who have administrative privileges. So you can take a deep breath as this Magento Enterprise Security Vulnerability won’t expose you to the rest of the world. However, if you have a poor admin user rights management, such as multiple users sharing the same log-in account and you may want to change this. Read more about proper Magento administrator user rights management in this follow up post.
What Damages could you be exposed to by this Magento Enterprise Security Issue?
A user with an administrator access to your Magento Enterprise store exploiting this issue could delete files and folders from your Magento installation. Should you drop everything and apply this patch? Not necessarily, many merchants should be in code freeze for the holidays season and you may be fine riding it out until January with your current code base.
You should tighten your admin access rights management no matter what. If you have past employees who still have access to your Magento admin panel, you should remove them.
This Enterprise Security Vulnerability does not affect Magento Community Edition
This vulnerability is limited to the Magento Enterprise edition only and does not affect the Magneto Community Edition. Magento Enterprise provides a great number of additional functionality with considerable more code
Please contact us for help with applying this Magento Enterprise security patch or help with your other Magento security concerns. An easy way to address all your security and performance concerns is with the proprietary Magento Health Check.
Please post any questions as comments here and our staff will help you get answers fast. Please keep questions around potential security risks private and use the “get it touch with us” form.
International Checkout does not depend on Magento, but integrates into any shopping cart using its advanced AJAX-driven single page checkout.
International Checkout Example
Using International Checkout with Magento or any other cart system is as easy as adding a button with your international customers to redirect them to International Checkout.
In addition, International Checkout is one of the very few solutions that take completely care of all forms, duty, and on top of that provides customer service to your customers. The number of positive reviews and testimonials speak volumes.
Magento Social Shopping tools provide a new frontier. It’s hard for marketers to get consumer attention these days–really hard. Click through rates (CTR) are abysmal. People fast-forward through ads on TV. Corporate sponsors pack NASCARs so full of logos hardly an inch of paint shows through. Traditional advertising works for giants–the Geicos of the world will continue to see results by throwing massive budgets at the best creatives and media buyers in town. For the little guy, this advertising commoditiszation is bad news. Luckily, a small group of entrepreneurs are helping even the playing field.
ShopTalk (shoptalkinc.com) is a revolutionary e-commerce software that replaces traditional advertising with reliable recommendations from friends, enter Magento Social Shopping. Shoppers are offered a discount at checkout to share about the awesome product they’re about to buy with their friends and followers through their social networks. With ShopTalk, friends can discover new brands and products from each other while they save a little money.
The shopper’s not the only one who wins here. Retailers, large and small alike, can see their site traffic jump from integrating ShopTalk’s Magento Social Shopping Plugin. Instead of ads, Facebookers see products coming directly from people they know and trust. No more big companies telling you what to buy! What’s more, these products aren’t crammed into the margins of the Facebook window–they’re right in the news feed. Shoppers who make a purchase can get instant feedback from friends who like or comment, increasing customer satisfaction. As if this all wasn’t enough, ShopTalk takes it a step further and supplies retailers with a detailed dashboard, showing analytics and information about how people are interacting with these posts on Facebook.
So let’s recap: shaking up the advertising game, replacing ads with social shopping recommendations, making “shopping alone online” not feel so “alone,” saving shoppers money, getting products prime real estate in the news feed, and delivering tailored analytics–what’s the catch? It’s cheap. (Oh wait, that’s not a catch.) Retailers only pay 50 cents per visitor that ShopTalk leads to their site. Everything else is free. ShopTalk is available for Magento as well as for Shopify with many more platforms to come, and the first 100 retailers to sign up get their first $100 on the house. Sounds like advertising is about to change in a big way.
About the author:
Tyler Hudson Crimi is CIO of Shop Talk as well as founding partner of Catalyze Marketing and Consulting. He has extensive experience managing internal and external information flow. His areas of expertise include gathering of user information, sculpting user interfaces, managing marketing materials and campaigns, and generating feedback and analytics supplied to retailers, which can all be seen in the Magento Social Shopping Module by Shop Talk created by Tyler and his team.
Sam Baron, VP of Development at Hara Partners gave a talk at AOL on the Magento Flavor Picker and Custom Design using some of Hara Partners’ recent work as examples. Some of the websites he covered included Crumbs and Suno, both using highly sophisticated custom designs and functionality.
Sam highlighed the Magento Flavor Picker that can be found on www.crumbs.com, www.macaroncafe, as well as on www.graeters.com.
The Magento Flavor Picker is well suited for food, but any kit that can contain a potentially huge number of combinations. The real number of combinations to create a 6 pack with 27 ice cream flavors is 387,420,489; or for a 48 pack of macarons with 28 flavor choices there are 2.9 e+69 combinations. Luckily, using the Magento Flavor Picker allow merchandising and selling a pack, and add any flavors to it.
Flavors can be Magento custom options or products in their own right with with inventory, price and any other attributes you need. This reduces the catalog complexity to a mere 28 products.
Crumbs and Greaters have additionally sophisticated drag and drop functionality, allowing multiple images. Crumbs provides a view inside its cup cakes to see the cream fillings, and shows a top view once individual cup cakes are placed into a 6 pack.
Hara Partners creates and launches the WebsiteAlive Live Chat Magento Module on Magento Connect.
WebsiteAlive Live Chat Magento Module
What makes the WebsiteAlive Live Chat different from all the other live chat solutions on the market? WebsiteAlive provides the only fully PCI compliant live chat in the world. Do you have customer provide personal information or even credit cards over your live chat? Then you may be looking at a compliance issue.
WebsiteAlive serves top teams in all the major leagues, NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL. Realizing that taking credit card payments for thousands of dollars over live chat is a huge problem, WebsiteAlive took matters in their own hands and revolutionized live chat by making it fully PCI-compliant.
Using the WebsiteAlive live chat Magento module is as easy as using the one-click install provided through Magento Connect in every Magento admin panel. Call us if you have problems and we will help you got get up to speed in no time.
What’s more the WebsiteAlive provides the AliveConcierge service to help you staff the live chat at all times without setting aside your valuable staff. AliveConcierge can field questions or act as an initial call answering service. All AliveConcierge agents are highly trained to provide the optimal customer experience and progress the sales process and cultivate valuable leads for you.
After installing Magento, the Magento error reporting has been turned off by default in the more recent versions. This can make troubleshooting difficult if you’re trying to get to the bottom of some problems.
The default error page looks nondescript like the following:
There has been an error processing your request
Exception printing is disabled by default for security reasons.
Error log record number: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
How to get errors to print onto your screen?
Locate the errors folder located in the Magneto root folder.
Rename the local.xml.sample file to local.xml
This will output all errors to the screen like the ones we post here from time to time.
How to save all errors into a folder?
In order to redirect the error output into a folder, look for the file:
/lib/Zend/Cache/Backend/File.php under the Magento root.
Change the following code: protected $_options = array(
'cache_dir' => 'null',
Specify the folder to save the errors in: protected $_options = array(
'cache_dir' => 'errors/',
This will save all error files into the “errors” folder. You may want to create a sub-folder.
Simplify your tax calculations and compliance requirements with SalesTax.com and the new Magento module. Download it now from Magento Connect through the 1-click install.
Get help deciding what specific Magento Solution is right for you. Let us help you.
Magento Rich Merchandising Suite allows online retailers to put their customers into groups, so you can pitch directly to them and their interests. As a store owner, you will know exactly what your customer has bought or is thinking of buying, and you can see exactly what they are searching for; to this end, you will then be able to show them related products – for example, if a customer is searching for ‘laptops’, you will be able to show them specific products such as peripherals (external hard drives or mice).
Magento can be a fickle beast indeed. It’s a fair guess that most entrepreneurs and developers would position themselves as perfectionists, and it can seem unduly difficult to wrangle a Magento build to perfection. To that end, it behooves us Magentians to look around at all the ways Magento platforms can go wrong, and—more importantly—how to correct a glitchy system. Thanks to Maria at Magento Store Manager Blog, we’ve got some great insights into the usual culprits.
What causes most Magento mistakes? At the big-picture level, tampering with design and structure. Many values in the database or core folders are precariously balanced with one another, such that a seemingly simple tweak can have confusing and long-lasting consequences. One accidental click here, another random confirmation dialogue there, and suddenly you’re ticking up support hours just to get back where you started.
So, ground rules: think before applying changes, document any of these changes, and always double-check with developers, either in-house or on web support forums. Remember, Magento isn’t very forgiving of click-happy users without thorough system familiarity. Let’s examine some common Magento mistakes:
Upgrading a Customized or Module-Enhanced Shopping Cart
This is a big one. Because it’s open source by nature, Magento offers up its code to any enterprising coder with an idea for an extension, and thus the perennial compatibility problems once Magento itself issues an upgrade. Furthermore, damage can occur on both sides—your store might suddenly malfunction in key areas, or the extensions themselves may get very sick. Sadly, you can’t just take someone at their word when they say their module is compatible with the latest Magento version, either.
What to do? Firstly, don’t fix what isn’t broken; there’s no need to jump on the brand-new upgrade bandwagon if you’re already running a stable version that fits your needs. You worked hard to get it that way, enjoy it as long as possible! If the upgrade is critical for your continued success, be sure to set up a new Magento installation on your server. Only then should you install necessary extensions, test them redundantly, and open your new store to the public.
Restoring an Older Shopping Cart Backup over a New Installation
This is kind of the last Magento mistake in reverse. Let’s say you’ve recently bumped up from Magento version 1.2 to 1.5, implementing massive system changes in the process, but then find that you’d like to restore a backup of your previous shopping cart. In this case, you’ll be trying to create a restore using files from the newer Magento version while pulling from the database corresponding to the older Magento version. That breaks Magento, plain and simple.
Here, the regular upgrade process will not work. You’ll have to make piecemeal renovations using Magento Import/Export instead of standard Backup and Restore procedures, and you should only restore backups that correspond with your current database.
Updating the ID Field to Varchar
A little more on the technical side, this hiccup arises when you want to modify fields with restrictions. For example, you might want to alter Product ID numeration or add extra values. Often, users will access the database via the control panel and manually set a field to varchar or any other type. Problem is, in the database the field ID must be set to “integer type with auto increment” in order to retain database integrity. Moreover, due to the Magento database’s complex structure (Entity Attribute Value (EAV) with all values mapped by ID), this then break s all database relationships.
Basically, you should avoid changing type for any ID field. Once a change is made, you’ll have to restore to pre-change backups in order to preserve functionality.
Deleting or Updating System Magento Attributes
Now, you may need to input some special value that doesn’t precisely fit a certain attribute or field, but it bears repeating: find some other means to do so. Messing with system Magento attributes can seriously hamper important tools, up to and including product creation/editing, order processing, and even frontend product visibility. Don’t do it, you will regret it.
Instead, search for the solution in default Magento functionality. You could, for example, create a new Magento attribute for the necessary data.
Changing Database Access Details
This can occur via the hosting control panel and is compounded when users forget to change said details in Magento itself. Should that be the case, products in the site will become unavailable and the following error message will display:
Access denied for user ‘your_magento_user’@’localhost’ (using password: YES)
The solution, as you may have guessed, involves inputting the same access details in the local.xml file (app/etc/local.xml, the Magento configuration file) as those in the control panel. Be extra cautious, because this procedure could cause serious damage if done incorrectly. We do not recommend updating or deleting users from the control panel.
Things can get pretty hairy if you try to change details during a Magento import or re-index. For example, if you’re using outside developers for certain services and you want to give them access as soon as possible, you may accidentally change access details while an important operation is running. It’s hard to tell what exactly will happen, but this Magento mistake often results in incomplete table alterations and/or missing data. Ergo: wait for all active processes to finish before attempting to change access details.
Forgetting to Disable Shopping Cart Maintenance Mode
Like leaving the parking brake on, this Magento mistake can show up even for otherwise diligent Magentians. If you’re dealing with extension installation or operations and forget to disable maintenance mode, the following error message will display:
Fatal error: Class ‘TBT_Common_Model_Resource_Mysql4_Setup’ not found in /var/www/html/includes/src/Mage_Core_Model_Resource_Setup.php on line 234
So disable maintenance mode and rest easy! Alternatively, you can work around this by manually deleting the maintenance.flag file from the root of your Magento directory. We don’t recommend this—it’s only applicable to rare fringe cases.
Magento is an ornery program. To function optimally, a Magento store requires the careful and measured actions of an experienced tender, and the proper conditions in which to blossom. In this piece I’d like to discuss the external, or environmental, side of the equation, and talk about how to choose the ideal Magento hosting partner.
Magento Hosting, why is this important?
As mentioned above, Magento is a particularly large and complex program and can easily become weighted down by the myriad processes it must handle, becoming a lumbering oafish thing, taking far longer than needed to perform tasks it should handle with ease – like an athlete gone to seed. Lowered page load times are a bad thing. In fact, more than a few studies have been performed to try and understand the relationship between page load times and conversions, and from their results it seems pretty clear that the two variables are inexorably and strongly inversely connected. Or, in layman’s terms, – the longer it takes your page to load times the worse your conversions will be. Choosing an improper Magento hosting partner could send your load times into a downward spiral.
What to look for in a Magento Hosting Partner.
This is no time to save a few a bucks by being someone’s guinea pig – find a company that has lots of prior experience with Magento hosting, and ask for references like past clients. Once you are convinced of the company in question’s expertise with Magento, you can begin to look at how they fit your business. Some things to consider: do they have a plan that fits your needs – do you have seasonal merchandise which would heavier traffic at some times? If you do business overseas it may make sense to use a CDN – can this company accommodate?
In truth, finding the right Magento hosting partner doesn’t require much more than common sense – find a company that has many Magento customers and chances are good that they can handle anything you could throw at them.
