Magento License – Questions and Answers

On the Magento website, you’ll find a section that discusses licensing for different editions of Magento. If you’re interested in some of the copyright issues involved for licensing the system, you might want to read up on it.

We’ve listed some a few of the questions below:

What are the terms of use for Magento Enterprise Edition?

Please review the Magento Enterprise Edition End User License Agreement for details regarding terms of use.

What open source Magento license do we use for Magento Community Edition?

Magento Community Edition is distributed under the Open Software License (OSL 3.0), and is thus open source software.

I’m a merchant. What does “open source” mean to me?

You may download, modify, use, and distribute the open source Software. You can be assured that Magento will continue to thrive because all contributions made to the software by you and others must be made available under the same OSL 3.0 license.

I’m a developer. What does the OSL 3.0 license mean to me?

OSL 3.0 allows developers access to the Magento Community Edition source code. Developers can modify and customize the software and distribute their own derivative works under the OSL 3.0 license. This will lead to a larger community of developers enhancing Magento in ways that are available to all.

Can I use Magento trademarks, service marks, and logos?

You may use the Magento trademarks, service marks, and logos in the manner in which you are licensed to do so, and in accordance with our trademark rules or any guidance that we provide to you. See more on trademark rules below.

Can I use the Magento trademark in one of my domain names or URLs?

No. You may not use the Magento trademark or any other mark associated with the Magento offering from our company in your domain name or URL. (For example, “www.magentohosting.com” is not allowed). See more on this topic below.

Zend is the leading provider of software and services for developing, deploying and scaling mobile and web apps written in PHP. The company is most well-known for Zend Framework, which is an open source framework for developing web applications and services using PHP 5.3+.

Zend Framework 2 uses 100% object-oriented code and utilizes most of the new features of PHP 5.3, namely namespaces, late static binding, lambda functions and closures.

Magento Zend Framework

Magento developers along with the Zend team will work together to make sure that key functionality is available throughout the stack. By enhancing and extending Zend Framework together, in the true spirit of Open Source collaboration, extending Magento becomes simple and Zend Framework becomes more powerful benefitting your whole PHP application stack as well.

Magento and Zend are working together to ensure that the world’s fastest growing eCommerce platform runs optimally on top of Zend Server, the world’s most complete and enterprise ready solution for running mission critical PHP applications. Zend Server enables you to get optimal performance from your Magento implementation. Zend Server’s built-in opcode acceleration provides a significant performance boost at zero effort, and Zend Server’s full page caching functionality lets you define simple caching rules to speed up delivery of static pages, without requiring application changes.

Magento and Zend are making it easier to get started no matter which platform you are using whether its Microsoft Windows or Linux. Download a complete stack of Magento bundles with Zend Server and see just how easy it is to break away from the starting line. Zend Server includes a complete, pre-integrated PHP stack that has been thoroughly tested to ensure the highest levels of reliability required for running an enterprise ready deployment of the world’s fastest growing eCommerce platform. Magento and Zend are empowering the future of eCommerce together, are you ready for it? Download a copy today.

You might think you know a lot about Magento—but the truth is, you don’t know jack compared to a real Magento specialist.

Magento Solution Specialists are expert users of the Magento ecommerce platform.

Drawing on a deep background in business and ecommerce, the Magento Solution Specialist can efficiently align business objectives with Magento functionality, optimize use of native features, and avoid unnecessary customization. Whether as a merchant, a manager, a consultant, or an analyst, the Magento Solution Specialist knows how to make the best use of Magento technology.

A Magento Certified Solution Specialist has deep familiarity with the Magento platform, including:

Magento Architecture: layouts, themes, extensions and customizations; Magento data models

Elements of a Magento ecommerce site: catalog, shipping, payment, order processing, promotions, extensions, import/export, etc.

Application of Magento knowledge to business goals: mapping client needs to Magento features, recommending the most effective options for implementing client requirements in Magento

Let’s face it: Magento is a really hard system to manage. Even our experts here in the office are constantly banging their head against the wall when a product isn’t being uploaded properly in Magento, and we have to scan through a gazillion lines of code in Excel just to make the darn thing work.

But we’ll guarantee you one thing: we know far more than most of the online retailers using Magento do. At Hara Partners, we’re certified Magento specialists (and if you read our previous article on trust seals, you should already know how serious we are about certifications).

And you probably wouldn’t even be on our website if you didn’t need our help. We have over ten years experience with Magento, and can help you out with any problem you might be having imaginable. At Hara Partners, we definitely place an emphasis on e-commerce solutions. Give us a call and we’ll hook you up.

What’s Version Control?

Version control is a system that records changes to a file or set of files over time so that you can recall specific versions later. For the examples in this book you will use software source code as the files being version controlled, though in reality you can do this with nearly any type of file on a computer.

Every change made to the source of the file is tracked in version control, along with who made the change, why they made it, and references to problems fixed, or enhancements introduced by the change.

You may have already heard of this term before if you’re in anyway familiar with the popular version control systems Subversion, Git, and Mercurial.

So why do we need version control systems?

The Necessity of Magento Version Control

In its very basic essence, version control works like this:

• The developer makes a file
• Person A checks that file into a repository
• Later on, Person A decides to make changes to that file, so they process a checkout.
• When the changes are done, Person A commits the file to the code repository. The file is then given a new version number.

Now your old version is kept in history so if you mess something up you can always put it back.

Other Features of Version Control

Branching

Branching allows the user to create new features or versions of a product. You can work in a branch and not affect your stability.

Merging

Merging allows you to get code from one place to another. This is often used once a development branch becomes ready for release. You would at that time merge that branch into the trunk. You can also merge revisions.

Tagging

Tagging is generally used for creating a snapshot for a release. You may tag releases as 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc.

This is a great way to do it and is easy no matter which version control system you use.

Uploading product images is realistically one of the least complicated processes in Magento; however, for those who are still new to the Magento Madness, we’re here to clarify any questions you might have with this simple guide.

We will also cover some of the more complex facets of image uploads once we introduce the basic steps.

Step One

The first thing that you are going to want to do is go to Catalog, and then Manage Products. Once you’re there, you’re going to want to go ahead and select a product from the screen.

After you’ve selected the product, let’s go ahead and go to ‘Images.’ You should see a screen like this.

Okay, you’re on the images tab. Now time for the most critical step: uploading the images.

Select ‘Browse Files,’ and then find the image that you want to upload. Once you find it, go ahead and upload it. Your screen should now look like this.

Adjusting Settings for Product Images in Magento

Once the image is in, you might probably want to know what the other settings mean.

• Label

Label will provide a name for your image. Similar to the ‘alt text’ field                   in images for blog posts, this is done mostly for SEO purposes. People                 will be able to find your image much faster than they otherwise would                 if the label wasn’t there.

• Sort Order

If you have multiple images, you can change the order that they appear in by modifying the sort order. Highlight the field and change one image to ‘1’ or ‘2’ or ‘3’ and so forth.

• Base Image, Small Image, and Thumbnail

You can also change where your images appear on the front-end. So let’s say if you have two images, you can select one to appear as a thumbnail on the product page, and the other—say, base image—to appear as the main image on the product detail page.

The small image is used for the product images in listings on category and search results pages.

Every open source or paid software and application have its own compatibility and system requirement to run the application smooth and efficiently over internet or at its targeted area.

Here Magento is also like that its built on PHP technologies using Zend Framework with well manner modular structure to make the things easier. Its vast and huge application to make the ecommerce merchants life easier.

Magento Requirements

Here are the system requirement which can guide you how you have to configure your system to run Magento eCommerce website.

Operating System Support for Magento
1. Linux x86, x86-64
2. Windows server on WAMP and XAMPP

Magento supported Web Servers
Apache 1.3x to Apache Latest 2.2x
Magento runs well on nginx for Magento 1.7 to Enterprise latest version

Magento PHP Compatibility
5.2.13 to latest PHP version

PHP Extension Required to be enabled on web server
Below php extension must have to be installed and enabled with php.ini in order to run Magento, if below extension are not enabled then there are chances Magento will not allow you to install on web server.
php_curl
simplexml
mcrypt
hash
PDO_MySql
GD
DOM
iconv
SOAP – To integrate your web store with third party applications
Safe_Mode = off
Memory Limit = 256MB minimum

Magento MySQL Requirement
MySQL 5.0.2 and newer for Enterprise Edition 1.13
MySQL 4.1.20 or newer for Enterprise Edition 1.12 and Magento Community Edition

SSL- Secure Socket Layer
SSL is required for any eCommerce stores also if you want https to be enabled for the admin and with customer and checkout in frontend then it’s required to have verified SSL configured on your web server for your website. Also self-signed SSL certificates not support with Magento.

Your Web Server Hosting Setup

• Your hosting must have facility to run and schedule cron script to update currencies and taxes automatically also its help to run some schedule job for log cleaning and other stuffs periodically.
• Also you must have read and write permission to override .htaccess rules.

Preferable Hosting Environment

• Nexcess.Com – Dedicated and Shared Server both are compatible with Magento – SSH supported for the dedicated server on request.
• Rackspace.Com is dedicated cloud support run well for Magento – SSH supported
• Amazon EC2 – is the best could server for Magento with dedicated access to perform all kind of activities using SSHAbove are the configuration which will run your Magento eCommerce Website smoothly and rapidly to give better user experience with faster page loading.If you are still not clear that our Expert Magento Consultant available to provide you better idea related to your server and Magento setup.

Those browsing on mobile devices currently account for at least 10% of all web traffic, which means that e-commerce retailers need to accommodate these users sooner rather than later.

How It Works

A mobile device is detected in the same way that your store detects different browsers. When someone visits your site from a mobile phone, your store detects the mobile browser and serves up the mobile theme, rather than your standard desktop theme. It all happens behind the scenes and is transparent to the user.

Setting Up Your Magento Mobile Theme

The Magento Go Mobile theme is easy to set up. Before you begin, take a few moments to explore the sample mobile theme to become familiar with the layout. The next step is to brand the theme for your store by choosing your colors, and adding your logo, background image, and banner. Finally, the last step is to click a checkbox to go mobile. That’s all there is to it!

Benefits of Magento Mobile

Quickly and easily create a storefront optimized for mobile devices so customers can shop even when they’re on the go. This mobile interface uses HTML5 technology and supports iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. It includes out-of-the-box features such as:

– Device-specific media capabilities for audio and video
– User-friendly search and results display
– Clean display of product detail pages
– Pinch, multi-touch and scaling images
– Easy swipe between product images
– Zoom capabilities
– Cross-sell and up-sell capabilities
– Drag-and-drop of products to the shopping cart

Magento Mobile for HTML5

The new compatibility with HTML5, which comes with Magento’s free Community edition e-commerce platform and its licensed Enterprise edition, is designed to help retailers drive up mobile commerce conversion rates and sales, says Roy Rubin, founder and general manager of Magento.

Magento says the HTML5 version of Magento Mobile includes:

– Image scaling and device-specific video and audio capabilities;

– New “user-friendly” search and results display;

– Drag and drop of products into a shopping cart;

– Cross-sell and upsell options;

– Swiping between product images, and product image zooming;

– Support for iPhone, Android and Mobile Opera browsers.

10 Easy Fixes to Common Magento Mistakes

When working in Magento, it’s always good practice to heed caution and think twice, because Magento can be quite unforgiving when it comes to the smallest mistakes.

We’ve compiled a list of ten easy fixes to some of the most common Magento mistakes below.

1. Configuring Magento to Work with a New Domain

There are two things you should do in order to configure Magento to work with a new domain:

• Edit the Magento database

Go to your cPanel > phpMyAdmin. Select your Magento database from the  left menu, find the table called core_config_data and click on it. Click the Browse tab and edit the first two fields:

web/unsecure/base_urlweb/secure/base_url

by clicking the pen icon in front of each of them. Replace your old domain name with your new one and click the Go button to save the change.

• Clear the Magento cache.

The Magento cache folder is located in your Magento installation directory > /var/cache. To clear the cache, simply delete the folder.

Many Magento issues can be fixed just by deleting the cache.

2. Resetting the Magento Admin Password

To change your Magento admin password, go to your cPanel > phpMyAdmin, select your Magento database, click the SQL tab and paste this query:

UPDATE admin_user SET password=CONCAT(MD5('sGnewpass'), ':sG') WHERE username='AdminUsername';

Note: You have to change newpass in the MD5(‘sGnewpass’) with your new password, and change *AdminUsername* to your Magento admin username.

Execute the query by clicking the Go button and your password will be changed.

3. Enabling Seaarch Engine Friendly URLs in Magento

To enable Search Engine Friendly URLs in Magento, you have to log in to the Magento administration area and click on the Configuration button. Under the System navigation menu, switch to Web page from the sub-navigation panel on the left.

When the page loads, you will see blue lines which represent closed options tablets. Click on the Search Engines Optimization tab and turn on the Use Web Server Rewrites (mark as Yes). Click on the Save Config button and your Magento SEF URLs will be enabled.

4. Speeding Up Magento

Many Magento issues are caused by slow performance. The recommended way to speed up Magento’s performance is to enable its Compilation function. The performance increase is between 25%-50% on page loads.

You can enable Magento Compilation from your Magento admin panel > System > Tools > Compilation.

5. Redirecting Magento to Open Through WWW

For SEO and usability purposes you may want to redirect your visitors to open your site only through www (http://www.yourdomain.com).

To do this in Magento, you should open the .htaccess file in the folder where your Magento is installed. In it locate the RewriteEngine on line and right after it add the following lines:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Once you do this, save the .htaccess file and log in to the Magento admin area > System > Configuration menu and from the left panel click the Web button.

Unfold the Unsecured set of options and change the Base URL option from http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com.

Save the changes and your Magento will start working through www.yourdomain.com only! 

6. How to Disable the Compare Products Functionality

You can disable the Compare products functionality in Magento by following these steps:

• Edit app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Helper/Product/Compare.php and change the following code: 

public function getAddUrl($product){return $this->_getUrl(’catalog/product_compare/add’, $this->_getUrlParams($product));}

to

public function getAddUrl($product){//return $this->_getUrl(’catalog/product_compare/add’, $this->_getUrlParams($product)); return false;}

• Edit ./app/design/frontend/base/default/layout/catalog.xml (if you are using a different Magento theme, enter its name instead of default) and change the following code:

<block type="catalog/product_compare_sidebar" before="cart_sidebar" name="catalog.compare.sidebar" template="catalog/product/compare/sidebar.phtml"/>

to

<!-- <block type="catalog/product_compare_sidebar" before="cart_sidebar" name="catalog.compare.sidebar" template="catalog/product/compare/sidebar.phtml"/> -->

• Flush the Magento cache from your Magento admin area > System > Cache Management.

7. How to Set Up a Blog in Magento

It is not difficult to set up a blog in Magento. However, note that this functionality is not included by default and you will have to use a custom extension to add it.

You can search Magento Connect for an extension that will fully suit your needs. One of the popular free extensions that you can use is the Magento Blog – Community Edition.

All Magento extensions are installed in a similar way that is thoroughly explained in our Magento Connect Tutorial.

Once the extension is installed, you will have one additional section in the top menu of your Magento admin area called Blog. From there you can adjust the newly-installed Blog settings, add posts, etc.

8. How to Add a Contact Us Form in Magento

Magento includes contact form functionality by default. A link to a contact form can usually be found in the footer of your Magento installation.

Of course, you can add a contact form on any page. All you need to do is:

• Log in to the administrator area.
• Go to CMS > Pages.
• Select the page you want to edit or create a new page.

Paste the following code using the HTML option of the WYSIWYG editor:

<!– CONTACT FORM CODE BEGIN–>{{block type='core/template' name='contactForm' template='contacts/form.phtml'}}<!– CONTACT FORM CODE END–>

Save the changes and the contact form will appear on the desired page.

9. “Access Denied” Issue

As a solution to the “Access denied” issue, you should log out from the Magento admin area and then log in again.

If the above does not help, you should reset the admin privileges. This can be done through the Magento admin area > System > Permissions > Roles > Administrators.

Click on the Role Resources option from the left menu and make sure that Resource Access is set to All.

Click on the Save Role button and the permissions will be reset.

10. How to Set a Custom Group of Users

You can add a new group from the Magento admin area > Customers > Customer Groups > Add New Customer Group.

Once a customer registers, you can change the group he/she belongs to from the Magento admin area > Customers > Manage Customers. Click on the Edit link next to the customer and change the group from the Account Information > Customer Group. Click Save Customer.

Set the discount from Promotions > Catalog Price Rules > Add New Rule.

In the Customer Groups select the customers’ groups for which the promotion is valid. Enter the other details, set the rule actions and conditions. Finally, click Save Rule.

The above ten tips will hopefully help you resolve at least some of the Magento issues you have faced or are about to face.

Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform solution that offers merchants complete
flexibility and control over the functionality of their online channel. Magento’s search engine optimization, catalog management, and powerful marketing tools give merchants the ability to create sites that provide an unrivaled shopping experience for their customers.

Magento’s intuitive administration interface allows you to tailor your site to your unique business needs. Completely scalable and backed by an extensive support network, Magento is the ultimate e-Commerce solution. Here is an overview of some main Magento features that you should be on the lookout if you choose to install it into your webstore.

Magento Features List

Marketing, Promotions and Conversion Tools

• Related products, up-sells and cross-sells
• Catalog promotional pricing with the ability to
restrict to stores, categories or products
• Flexible coupons (pricing rules) with ability to
restrict to stores, customer groups, time period,
products, and categories
• Generate a set of unique coupon codes for
each promotion and export the list of codes for
offline distribution, email, newsletters and more.
Easily manage and monitor coupon usage and
generate detailed reports
• Multi-tier pricing for quantity discounts
• Minimum Advertised Price (MAP)
• Landing page tool for categories
• Customer groups
• Product bundles
• Recently viewed and compared products
• New items promotional tool
• Persistent shopping cart
• Google Website Optimizer integration for A/B
and multivariate testing
• Free shipping options
• Polls
• Newsletter management
• Send to a friend for all visitors or registered
users only
• Send wish lists by email

Search Engine Optimization

• 100% search engine friendly
• Google Site Map
• Search engine friendly URL’s
• URL rewrites give full control of URL’s

• Attribute sets for quick product creation of
different item types
• Inventory management with backordered items,
minimum and maximum quantities
• Batch updates to products in admin panel
• Automatic image resizing and watermarking
• Advanced pricing rules and support for
special prices
• Search results rewrites and redirects
• Moderated product tags and reviews
• Customer personalized products – ability to
upload images and text (i.e. for embroidery,
monogramming, etc.)
• Customer sorting – define attributes for customer
sorting on category (price, brand, etc.)
• RSS feed for low inventory alerts

Rich Merchandising Suite (RMS)

• Segment customers into groups and optimize marketing initiatives by identifying specific customer groups using specific characteristics (address, location, sex, etc.) and/or value (purchase history, on-site browsing, etc.).

• Advanced segmentation capabilities include the ability to identify unknown site visitors.

Whether they’re new visitors or returning customers who have not logged in, you’ll now be
able to identify and target them with special promotions to convert browsers into buyers.

So now you know more about Magento’s features. Why not give us a call, and we’ll set you up with what you need?