Custom Magento Development
The Classy Llama team has been developing on the Magento platform since its release in early 2008. In early 2009, we shifted our full focus to Magento development. After three years of solid growth and dozens of happy clients, we haven’t looked back. Needless to say, we’ve had a lot of time to develop a truly exceptional Magento development team. Due to Magento’s brilliantly flexible structure, we’re able to do virtually anything with Magento – if you can dream it, we can build it. And if you need help dreaming it, we can help with that, too.
As you may have guessed, our team is very passionate about developing on the Magento platform: We write blog posts about it, we continually add to our long list of Magento development best-practices, we’ve developed a proprietary code editor plugin to increase our in-house efficiency, and one of our developers recently helped write a Magento development book.
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Triple Defense
eCommerce is built on a foundation of code, and it’s very important that the foundation is dependable, secure, and flexible. We have implemented a “triple defense” system to ensure that the foundational integrity of your eCommerce structure is maintained while making changes to it.
The third line of defense is the staging environment. According to standard best practices, we make all changes in a “padded room,” a private, password-protected staging site identical to the live site. If any unexpected results occur, we haven’t lost any sales or damaged customer relations. Even the most sane people need a padded room from time to time, and we’re no exception. But when it goes live, you can be sure it’s solid.
The second line of defense is our subversion system, commonly called SVN. SVN allows multiple developers to work on one project at the same time without getting in each other’s way. It also provides a full version history of changes made to the core “repository” of code, allowing easy rollbacks to earlier versions should a change cause any problems. And of course, all of these changes are being made to the staging environment not the live site, so it’s not causing any irreparable harm. If you haven’t gotten a warm, safe feeling by now, read on.
The first line of defense lies in our development team’s execution of proper quality assurance and debugging practices on their local development servers. CLS developers download the current code from the central SVN “repository” to their individual development servers, giving developers a full understanding of how their changes will affect the current live site. All code developed is reviewed for quality by a lead developer, providing a second factor of defense at this level. Lead developers are also actively available to provide guidance to primary developers during the development process.
The primary benefit of these multiple lines of defense is the liberation of our development team to be innovative in a risk-free environment, not having to worry about how their changes will damage the live site or complicate progress for other parallel developers.
The secondary benefit is that you can sleep at night knowing that your development team is not conducting experiments on your live site.
Since we develop collaboratively, we also developed some really cool scripts that allow our developers to work together without stepping on each other’s toes. These tools also allow us to easily and effectively integrate our development efforts with other development teams.
The scripts we have developed will sync the development and staging servers with the live site, providing the ability for developers to collaborate, while still maintaining their own development environments. The process we use to replicate the server environment acts as a testing ground for disaster recovery measures, as revisions and backups are used to recreate additional environments for development and testing. As further evidence of our ability to deliver quality, see the following highly abridged list of Magento customizations we’ve completed:
Magento Modules
Featured Products Module
Enhances the core Magento functionality
to allow for the administrator to select
any number of products to feature on the
homepage.
Single-Step Authorize.net Refunds
This module saves the administrator a lot of time when
processing refunds when using Authorize.net. It enables
Authorize.net credit card transactions to be refunded online
through the admin interface when a credit memo is issued. A
refund transaction is automatically passed through Authorize.
net using the original transaction ID to refund an amount
back to a customer’s credit card without having to enter the
credit card information. Learn More »
Created on behalf of UMA
Wordpress Integration
Allows Wordpress’ brilliant content management functionality to be
harnessed by Magento. Pages created in Wordpress are directly
accessible on the Magento site via their page “slug” (ie, page url).
Content from the Wordpress page is loaded into the Magento
content section, effectively eliminating the need to maintain both
a Magento theme and a Wordpress theme. This results in increased
efficiency in development and management of the site and a more
cohesive design layout.
Created on behalf of UMA
Digishop Import Module
Switching e-commerce solutions can become unfeasible
due to the costly process of manually transferring
customer and order data from the existing platform to
the new platform. This import module eliminates that
barrier for transitions from Digishop eCommerce systems
by providing for the importation of customers and orders
from Digishop into Magento. The import process was
customized to handle some heavy customization that
had been done to the Digishop database structure.
Created on behalf of UMA
Order Status Changes
Extends the default set of order status options available so that better order management can
be maintained by changing the status of certain orders for specialized fulfillment processing.
Created on behalf of UMA
Serial Numbers Module
Extends Magento’s Virtual Product in order to significantly improve efficiency in selling software that requires a
serial number for validation. When a customer purchases a Serial Number Product, a serial number is assigned
to their order and a copy of that serial number is emailed to the client. An admin panel allows the administrator
to manage all assigned/unassigned serial numbers. Serial numbers are added to the system using this same
interface. Without this module, the administrator would have to manually assign serial numbers and e-mail
them to customers.
Created on behalf of UMA
Product Carousel Module
Enabling easier navigation between products within the same category, this
module displays a sliding list of all products in the same category as the product
being viewed. This is another
module we will be releasing to
the community in the near future.
Our Designers Know Their Stuff Too!
Design is not merely a process of solving problems. It is a process of identifying and understanding the problem and creating a solution intuitively and dynamically, infused with wisdom founded on experience.
A successful Magento eCommerce design is not just about a good looking site with the newest trends and style. Sure, we can deliver that. But is that form going to resonate with your target market? Have you considered your customers’ demographics, sociographics, and psychographics?
The point at which we consider these various segmentations in the design process is the same point at which the design becomes more than pretty pictures. It becomes a work of creation with purpose, not lifeless form but intentional function.
You need a design created to fit your company, your product, and your customers. This is our specialty. Like any store in the mall, there’s a very specific look and feel which reinforces a company’s branding and creates the atmosphere for the optimal shopping experience. 
The idea is simple: Buying from your store should come as naturally to your target market as shopping in their local grocery store. We accomplish this through consistency and intuitive UI design throughout the online shopping experience.
Our creative director brings more than 10 years of experience creating design solutions in diverse fields focusing on web, print, and UI design. Effectively drawing from this experience, we leverage Magento’s robust flexibility to create a design tailored to your eCommerce needs. We mold Magento to your business, not your business to Magento. We design your success – one size fits you and you only.
