Archive for the ‘Magento’ Category
Staying Safe During the Online Christmas Shopping Season
Monday, December 5th, 2011
With Christmas fast-approaching, most of the llamas and their families are heading to online stores to find gifts. You already know the reasons for wanting to shop online: awesome prices, free shipping, wider selection, and not paying sales tax. Possibly most importantly: the only way to do all of your shopping in pajamas!
Here at Classy Llama, we know eCommerce. Working with and building sites all day long gives us a pretty keen eye whenever we go to a site. We know what quality looks like. On the flip side of that, we also can tell when something isn’t right.
This past weekend when my wife plopped her laptop down beside me and asked me the question “Should I order from this site?” It prompted me to show her how I validate the occasional site that I go to that looks sketchy. This post aims to answer that question “How do I know if I can trust this site?”
Four Signs of a Funky eCommerce Site
- Design & Content
- SSL
- Site Verification
- BBB / Online Search
Design
One of the first indicators you should look for (and the first thing you’ll see) is the design and the content of the site. Sites that are scam sites don’t normally tend to expend much effort on the aesthetics of their site. While not all sites are ugly or contain any of these signs, these can be a big clue that the site you are on is not what it seems to be. This is not entirely comprehensive, but it can definitely point you in the right direction.
Consistently Bad English & Grammar
Do they use proper english? What about grammar? Sites that don’t pay attention to these very simple things are probably not paying attention to things like shipping your order or keeping your credit card information to themselves.
- “Discount Off 57%”
- “includes returning and exchanging goods that you are not happy”
- “company establish in 2002, and have large business”
Reviews That Don’t Add Up
Just because a site shows that a product has 5-stars doesn’t mean that those 5-stars are reviews. If you click on a product and don’t see reviews, chances are that those stars are just there to make you think those products have reviews.
Funny Site Statistics
On one particular site, I refreshed the page a couple of times and the “guest counter” would change every time the page refreshed. Not like a regular site, where the number might change slowly. This one changed wildly. I’ll go a step farther and say that, most likely, if the store you are on has a “who’s online” or “guest counter” it is probably fake.
Contact Information
Never, ever buy from a store that does not have contact information. If you can’t get a phone number, address, or some other piece of information that ties them to a specific place, chances are that they don’t exist!
SSL
SSL or Security Sockets Layer is a technology that is designed to make sure your information gets transmitted safely and securely. Never, ever buy from a site that does not use SSL. How can you tell if you are using SSL. Well, the fastest way is to look at the location: What are the first 7 or 8 characters?
http:// UNSECURE!
https:// Secure! https stands for “Security HTTP” and is what you should see after you’ve added a product to your cart, are viewing your cart, or are going anywhere through the checkout process.
If you are unfamiliar with SSL, you should take a look at Verisign’s Beginner’s Guide to SSL Certificates.
Recently, SSL vendors have added something called Extended Validation that shows a visible green bar at the top of your browser, noting that a site has gone through an “audited, rigorous authentication method.” These will also show you who the site is. A site with extended validation looks like this:
Extended Validation SSL
Whereas, a site with just plain ol’ SSL looks like this:
Regular SSL
Both of these are fine. For more information on SSL, check out the Beginner’s Guide to SSL Certificates.
Site Verification
One thing that truly signifies a “real-deal” site are working site verification logos. The site you are buying from should have them. If that do not, that could be a big sign that this site is not being very truthful with you. What do these verification logos look like? I invite you to take a look at Freedom Paper:
You’ll notice that there are four logos here. Now, alone, these logos don’t mean a thing. Anyone who wants to look legit can easily copy-and-paste these images and put them on their site. What you must be able to do is click on them. Try clicking on the GoDaddy.com Verified & Secured Logo. You’ll see this:
GoDaddy Verification
This is what is important. You should be able to click on every one of those. Sites that go the extra mile to comply and provide verifiable links are a sure sign that your data is safe and protected on those sites.
What Do Others Say?
Finally, don’t be afraid to search for the site by name. Using a major search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo!, look for complaints. You can also check out the Better Business Bureau or Ripoff Report to see if a site has complaints against it. Another site called Web of Trust is actually attempting to make the web safer by providing website “reputation” with a browser plugin so that you can see if a site has a good or bad reputation.
I want to note that just because a site has a complaint or two or five doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to steal your money and run away. You can’t please everyone and some people will complain just because they can. Looking at reports and reviews of a site is another tool in your toolbox.
Putting It All Together
Well, can you trust a site? Chances are that a site can meet all of the criteria here, it’s legit. I personally have been bitten by site that met all four of these criteria. My credit card was stolen and used.
If any site you visit is missing just one of the criteria, browse cautiously. Some small stores may not have SSL because you pay via PayPal and they don’t need SSL since PayPal handles things securely. Give them a call.
However, if a site has 2 or more of these signs then I’d highly advise not purchasing from that site and finding a site that does take these things seriously.
Conclusion
I hope you found these tips helpful. If you have any more please leave them in the comments below. Shop safe and Merry Christmas!
Posted in Magento | 1 Comment »
X.commerce Innovate Developers Conference Day Two Highlights
Friday, October 14th, 2011
Yesterday was all about X.commerce and the community at large, but today we focused solely on Magento.
During the first session, we got to hear from Dmitry Soroka about what the Magento 2 roadmap looks like. Magento is putting a lot of effort into making Magento 2 a real upgrade from Magento 1: making it faster, more scalable, more expandable, more flexible, and more awesome in general. Here are some of the highlights:
- Backwards Compatibility is broken – Normally developers love backwards compatibility because it makes our lives easier: we don’t have to update code every time a new version comes out. However, this time around, Magento has decided to forgo it. This is actually a very good key decision. Now, they have the chance to fix some important architecture problems that would be much harder or impossible to solve while maintaining backwards compatibility. This will result in extensions working better inside the system and minimize conflicts that are common in the current version of Magento.
- Multiple DB support – Magento 2 will support Oracle, MySQL, MSSQL and PostgreSQL out of the box. In fact, Magento Enterprise 1.11 has this functionality already. Now, it will make it into the core of the community edition. For larger enterprise users, the ability to run Magento inside of their existing infrastructure can potentially save time and money by allowing Magento to speak to those databases directly instead of having to integrate with modules or other middleware.
- Performance – They’ve already benchmarked a 20% performance increase over Magento 1. There is a lot of room to grow and it’s a big focus. It’s safe to say that Magento 2 will have a noticeable performance gain over Magento 1.
- Developer Tools & Documentation – They’ve been able to redesign and update several core pieces of Magento as well as developer tools. Documentation is another big thing. They’ve already released documentation for Magento 2 on their Confluence Wiki and are working to make their processes, tools, and methods open & transparent. This is apparent in how they are approaching the testing for Magento 2. (See below!) This is a huge boon to us developers and will help us to continue to write quality code.
- Theme & Design updates – It looks like they are planning on taking some of the design functionality that Magento Go offers and including it straight into Magento’s core. Making simply design modifications very accessible to store owners. They’re also making the advanced theme functionality better by removing a lot of the limitations that are placed on theme developers during the implementation process. This means that making smaller theme modifications are much easier to do and could make it worthwhile to do, for instance, seasonal designs while still keeping your primary theme untouched.
We’re excited about what Magento 2 has to offer and were elated to be able to download and begin to play with the Magento 2 code that was released today.
One of the key things that is driving the quality code coming from the core team are the tools that they use to test and validate what they are writing. We heard from Anton Makarenko (Sr. PHP Developer on the Core Team @ Magento) about the unit testing capabilities that are being added to Magento 2.
We won’t bore you with all of the technical details, but suffice it to say that they are taking great lengths to ensure that bugs don’t creep into Magento 2 during development and that the tools that they are using are going to be made available to the community for improvement and use. They’ve done a lot of the work solving the technical problems of testing Magento and are giving us the ability to do the same thing for our own extensions and code.
So when is Magento 2 coming out? Well, there is no official roadmap yet, but the word on the street is that in Q3 2012, we’ll see the first alpha release and some time in Q4 2012 will be the final release.
That about wraps it up! We had a wonderful time at the Innovate Developers Conference and look forward to coming back next year.
Posted in Magento | No Comments »
Classy Llama Skype Extension is Featured on Alfred’s New Support Site
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
[By the way, if you haven't already, you should check out our blog post about the Skype Extension we wrote for Alfred that allows to send Skype messages with Alfred.]
Alfred has featured our Skype Extension on their new support site as one of their team picks.
I received this sweet email from Anna Manasova, the Community and Marketing Director for Alfred:
Hi Kevin,
Just wanted to drop you a quick line and say thanks for creating a brilliant Alfred extension. We’ve now launched a new support site for Alfred and with it a section showcasing some of the best user-created extensions (including yours!). I use Skype everyday so yours is very useful.
You can find our extension on the “Every Day Useful” extension page.
Posted in Magento | No Comments »
X.commerce Innovate Developers Conference Day One Recap
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
Good golly, what a day! So much ground was covered today. It would be really hard to talk about every single thing that happened today, but we’d like to share we you some cool & interesting highlights from the first day of the Innovate Developers Conference.
This conference is not just a Magento or a PayPal conference. We’ve got developers, vendors and users from across the whole X.commerce sphere: eBay, PayPal, Magento, X.commerce, marketing, SEO… you name it. Truly a huge cross-section of individuals and companies. It has been amazing getting to meet with people from across the globe to share ideas and discuss all sorts of topics.
Of course, the main reason we came here is to learn about the newly released X.commerce platform. Operating system. Fabric. No really, fabric. What is it, and what does it mean for you?
Well, the X.commerce fabric is essentially a platform-independent intermediary that allows you to write one integration for your service/cart/application/etc and then allows you to provide that service or consume other services from anyone else who also talks to the fabric. Perhaps the easiest analogy is to languages. Right now, each cart/service/API speaks own language. In order for your cart to “talk” to Mailchimp (for instance) you must “teach” it to speak that the Mailchimp “language” by writing a module for it to “translate”. With X.commerce, though, you let your service (say, Mailchimp, again) to “speak” X.commerce and you teach your cart to “speak” X.commerce and the two will be able to talk to each other. Not just that, but any other cart that can “speak” X.commerce can also “speak” with Mailchimp, since it speaks X.commerce.
Another angle: let’s say you run a small business and you use Magento Go for your website. And, for the sake of the example, you use three services to help you: Mailchimp (for E-mail), Kenshoo (for advertising), and Shopon (for social). You decide to go with Magento Enterprise. Instead of having to find 3 modules that implement each of these integrations separately, you can use the built-in X.commerce fabric that is a part of Magento Enterprise to talk to these services automatically. No extra time involved. They’ll just work. That’s the power of X.commerce. (It’s explained in more detail, here.) Note that the platform/fabric itself is not generally available yet, but you can download the Developer Package now.
It’s worthwhile to note that although Magento and GSI Commerce are both a part of the X.commerce Magento really stole the show! All but one of the demos of X.commerce were done on Magento Enterprise. Lots of Magento love today!
What else? We heard about Magento and X.commerce. The X.commerce team has learned a lot from the Magento team. There will be a version of the X.commerce fabric available for Magento when it becomes generally available. We heard about the growth of the industry and how eCommerce will be a 10 trillion (yes, trillion) dollar industry by 2013. Magento unveiled their revamped Magento Connect 2, which easily links Magento store owners with extensions. Magento U, Magento’s training unit, will now offer courses online. Finally, Magento 2 was announced to be released in 2012 and a certified module program (which certifies modules for Enterprise) was also talked about.
As we were leaving tonight, the X.commerce folks formed a human fabric. It went all the way from Moscone West to Moscone North. It was quite a site!
Well, that about wraps it up for today. We’re pretty beat from all of the excitement. Check back tomorrow for more news and highlights from day 2.
Tags: Magento, x.commerce
Posted in Magento | 1 Comment »
Heading to the X.commerce Innovate Developer Conference
Monday, October 10th, 2011
On Tuesday, a few of us llamas will be heading over to San Francisco to attend to the Innovate Developer’s Conference. We’re really excited to be a part of this conference for a couple of reasons.
First and foremost, we’re enthusiastic about the potential the X.commerce platforms brings to the Magento and eCommerce communities. It is a very ambitious end-to-end, multi-channel platform that aims to make the constantly changing and evolving world of eCommerce easy to access. On top of that, it’s open source! We’ll be watching this story unfold and can’t wait to see the fruit: what makes it into Magento and what features and services will be born out of this platform that can help us more effectively serve our customers and make them more successful.
Secondly, we are glad to hear that Magento’s Developer Certification will enter beta at Innovate. As you may have heard, our own David Alger was one of many on their Certification Advisory Board. We can’t wait to take the test!
Thirdly, it will be great to meet and visit with our friends from Magento and the greater Magento community. It’s not very often that we get to spend any amount of time with so many others in the eCommerce industry.
We’ll be updating our blog as time allows while at Innovate. You can follow along on the X.commerce blog or watching the #innovate tag on twitter.
Posted in Magento | No Comments »
Magento Modules and the Community
Thursday, October 6th, 2011
This post outlines some of our thoughts about the state of the Magento module community, and an idea for how Magento can improve the quality of that community.
Here at Classy Llama Studios we create our own Magento modules every day and have high standards for any module that we write. These standards include having properly commented code, adhering to Zend programming standards, and having both the code and functionality of the module reviewed before it is released. Magento is great because, instead of having to write every module that we use, there are numerous other quality development companies whose modules we can draw from for sites that we develop. Unfortunately, there are a lot of modules out there that are not quality. Issues with modules that we encounter include poorly written code, SQL vulnerabilities, improper code domain separation, and improper utilization of the Magento Application functionalities. Some of these modules do not even work.
This abundance of modules often leaves us with a challenging question. Do we recommend this module to our client? If we do, we often have to prepare our clients for the possibility of hours of development, in addition to the module cost, that may be required to make the module safe and functional. The other option is that we have to take a loss to bring the module to the level necessary for use on our customers’ eCommerce platform. We love our customers and so it is painful for us to have to make either of these choices when the customer is already paying for the module. Because of this, we have been asking ourselves if there is some sort of solution to the problem of poorly coded modules.
The answer we came up with is twofold. For now, we can buy most of our modules from the great companies who have earned our trust up to this point; these companies include AheadWorks, Unirgy, and WebShopApps. This alleviates the problem but it does not come close to eliminating it. We know that there are other developers who write quality modules. We simply don’t know who they are until we have worked with and reviewed their modules. We think that Magento itself is the solution to this dilemma.
Even though Magento has had explosive growth since the release of Magento 1.0, it has only been three and a half years since its release. Since then, Magento has gone through dramatic transitions and upgrades turning it into a much more streamlined and powerful system with numerous features and a massive community. With eBay’s acquisition of Magento, its future looks even brighter. Since Magento is so young, however, there are certain features and programs that they have not had or taken the time to develop. We believe that the development of a Magento module certification would be a great step for the company and the community at large. Magento has over 4800 modules in Magneto Connect, and we realize that reviewing every one of them would be a massive undertaking, so we think that it should be something that Magento would be best able to facilitate on a voluntary basis. When Magento certifies a module, that module would receive special recognition and be more accessible to developers and store owners. This would take the burden of code review and repair off individual development companies or users purchasing the modules and put it back on the original developers of the module. While this could take time to implement, we think that it is an endeavor from which the entire Magento community would benefit.
We’ve communicated this idea to Magento. Here is a snippet of what we’ve told them: … There are many poor quality developers and modules, and the current system doesn’t provide a system of being able to determine which modules are good, and which are not. The current Magento Connect is much like the Android Marketplace – thousands of apps, with only a portion of them being high quality. While we would not like to see the same level of curation as the iOS Marketplace, we would like to see more attention being paid to ensuring that quality modules are promoted, and poor-quality modules are being demoted…
We sincerely hope that Magento does this, but regardless of what they do, we love the platform and will continue to support the company and the community to the best of our ability. We believe that Magento truly is the eCommerce “Platform for Growth” and that it’s many features, programs, modules, developers, store owners, and fans make it a wonderful and enjoyable platform to work with every day.
Tags: Community, Magento, Modules
Posted in Development, Magento, Magento Development, Management | 5 Comments »
Wiz 0.9.5: Admin & Developer Tools, Batch Output
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
The latest batch of Wiz updates includes some useful stuff for developers as well as some administrative features. Included in this bundle of Wizzy goodness is the ability to output any table output in csv, pipe, or tab delimited output. This makes it very easy to utilize Wiz with other commands (or potentially feed information from Wiz back into itself!)
Here is a complete list of the changes in 0.9.5:
- The internal configuration system was rewritten to look more like Magento’s own configuration system — using XML files. This isn’t really used heavily yet, but we’ve got some stuff coming in the next few months that will take full advantage of this.
- You can now toggle the following “developer” flags from the CLI:
- Allow Symlinks (For templates, 1.5.1.0+)
- Logging
- JS Merging
- CSS Merging
- Profiler
- You can view all of the above configuration values as well with the
devel-configcommand. - Get a list of all registered event listeners.
- Get a list of all Models registered in the system and module rewrites.
- Scriptable output. Output tabular data in csv, pipe-delimieted, or tab-delimited formats.
If you just want to get going:
Browse on Github
Website / Download
Be sure to read over the Readme file on Github for more information about the added commands!
The Good Stuff
Okay, so the configuration system isn’t a huge deal… but it does open up more potential for 3rd party developers to write plugins that need to store things: usernames, passwords, etc. without having to provide their own storage mechanism. Let’s get to the really exciting stuff!
Developer Configuration
$ wiz devel-config +---------------------------------+-------+ | Path | Value | +---------------------------------+-------+ | dev/debug/profiler | No | | dev/js/merge_files | No | | dev/css/merge_css_files | No | | dev/log/active | No | | dev/debug/template_hints | No | | dev/debug/template_hints_blocks | No | | dev/template/allow_symlink | No | +---------------------------------+-------+
You can now flip off/on or view the status of each of these independently. Each of these work the same way devel-showhints works.
Developer Helpers
One of the things I’m curious about sometimes is to see what modules are listening to what events. Well, now with a new command, you can see that:
wiz devel-listeners give you a list of the events and the modules and their model/method that is responding to that event.
Often times, I want to know what overrides have been performed by other modules. Now I can see a total picture of what modules provide what models:
As you can see, all of the standard models are shown, but you can also see what overrides are performed by all of the modules on the system.
Scriptable Table Output
Finally, of the coolest thing (in my opinion) is the scriptable output. Wiz has a pretty decent table output system that makes it fairly easy for your eyes. However, getting that data out of the table took me far too much time. Enter --batch.
The –batch argument takes the model list we show above and transforms it into:
"Model Name","PHP Class"
varien/*,Varien_*
core/*,Mage_Core_Model_*
core_resource/*,Mage_Core_Model_Resource_*
eav/*,Mage_Eav_Model_*
eav_resource/*,Mage_Eav_Model_Resource_*
page/*,Mage_Page_Model_*
install/*,Mage_Install_Model_*
install_resource/*,Mage_Install_Model_Resource_*
admin/*,Mage_Admin_Model_*
The –batch argument can take one of three arguments: csv, pipe, or tab. csv is the default (as you can see above). Pipe replaces the commas with “|”s and tabs… well, you get the idea. 
Now you can take your Wiz output and pipe it through grep, cut, etc. or output straight to CSV and load it up into Excel/Numbers/OpenOffice/etc.
Enjoy!
Get Wiz
Browse on Github
Website / Download
Posted in Development, Magento, Magento Development, Wiz | 1 Comment »
Documentation, Markdown, and Pandoc
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011
We’ve been doing a ton of work on documentation around llamaville lately, and since many of us working here are programmer types, most of our doc systems are configured to use the Markdown markup language (link) for writing richly formatted content. This is great, with one small problem – our project management system doesn’t currently support Markdown. It uses a WYSIWYG editor, or can take straight HTML input.
I strongly dislike WYSIWYG editors, as they are slow and difficult to work with in my experience, and writing HTML directly is also time consuming and laborious. Life has ben rough, until last night when I stumbled across a little gem of a program: Pandoc by John McFarlane (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/).
Pandoc is a beautiful little markup converter that can convert just about any common markup language to just about any other common markup language.
What this means is that I can take HTML input, convert it to Markdown for editing, and then convert the Markdown back to HTML for upload and input. This streamlines my editing process significantly, and makes my life as a documenter and scope write so much easier. In my experience so far, it has done a beautiful job with everything I’ve thrown at it, even gracefully taking some pretty ugly HTML and making beautiful, clean Markdown out of it.
Following is a sample command I use to grab HTML content from my clipboard, reformat it as Markdown, and spit it out in TextMate, my editor of choice:
# pbpaste | pandoc -f html -t markdown | mate
This would, of course, work for any format supported by Pandoc, which includes the popular Textile among other languages.
Cheers!
~Rob
P.S. I’m also evaluating a slick little Markdown editor I found called Macchiato. Check it out: http://getmacchiato.com/
Posted in Magento | No Comments »
Wiz 0.9.3-beta: Better Admin User Creation, Cache Clearing & Indexing
Wednesday, July 13th, 2011
It has been a while, but Wiz has not been forgotten!
The latest update, 0.9.3-beta, brings the following new features and improvements:
- Indexing functions and information are now available.
- Caching now supports clearing and viewing invalidated caches.
- Caching now has more options to clear all of the various Magento caches.
- Errors setting up admin users on linux systems should be resolved.
- Adding Admin users should now work for every version and configuration. The SQL method for creating users was removed in favor of using the admin user model.
Enjoy!
Browse on Github
Website / Download
Posted in Magento | No Comments »
eBay Acquires Magento (Inside Information)
Thursday, June 9th, 2011
As you’ve heard by now, eBay will be closing on a 100% acquisition of Magento in the third quarter of 2011. This should not surprise anyone too much considering eBay took a substantial stake in Magento with a $20-something million investment in February with the string attached that Magento develop Magento Go to compete with the entry-level eCommerce market, equipping eBay to offer a plug-and-play SaaS eCommerce solution to their millions of eCommerce customers using PayPal. Add in the fact that eBay is a huge player in the eCommerce world, and it makes sense they would want to create a comprehensive offering by blending together their eBay and PayPal offerings with an eCommerce platform offering.
So, it makes sense. Now the real question: What does the future of Magento look like? I’m going to stick my neck out here and take a guess based on my conversations with Magento insiders yesterday, my knowledge of Magento’s market position development since it’s inception, and eBay’s current position. First, let’s take a look back and see what eBay has been doing up to this point to build this X.Commerce “operating system.” First, PayPal purchased a 49% stake of Magento back in February, and Magento then builds a hosted SaaS version of its software, Magento Go, to service the lowest end of the market. Then eBay acquires GSI Commerce, a company that services the highest end of the eCommerce market, for $2.4 billion. Shortly before this, eBay announced that they would be bringing together their eBay and PayPal developers to one conference in October, 2011 to begin the process of collaboration and unity. And earlier this week, eBay has now completed their conquest and purchases Magento, which services the mid-sized eCommerce market. While there are still certainly more acquisitions to be had, eBay has positioned itself to effectively service eCommerce merchants of all sizes.
That’s all easy stuff, though. The real question is, how is eBay going to bring all of this together under one roof? Will their be one software platform to rule them all? Or will eBay keep them segregated. I believe that eBay must keep the GSI Commerce side of the business separate from the Magento and Magento Go side of the business. If nothing else, for this simple reason: Magento is open-source and PHP-based. GSI is proprietary and Java-based. Combining two completely different platforms would be very challenging, and if they did combine them, they would nearly certainly have to maintain Magento’s open-source nature to retain the development community’s buy-in, which is a leading reason for Magento’s massive success.
What I do think is more possible is that Magento, Magento Go, and GSI will be rebranded under the X.Commerce flag in some way, but not immediately. I am very confident eBay doesn’t want to make one ring to rule them all. Rather, they’re building a ring shop, so if you want a ring, you know where to go: X.Commerce.
Posted in Magento | 3 Comments »
