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.

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.

I recently came across an answer on a LinkedIn question, and I wanted to share it with you all. Roy Rubin, CEO of Varien, the company that designed and built Magento, the open-source e-commerce platform that has totally reinvented the e-commerce landscape.

The question was asked, “What are the pros and cons of Magento compared to middle and high end e-commerce proprietary solutions?”

Roy responds with a numbered list of reasons in support of Magento, and I really appreciated them.  In his fifth bullet point, he specifically heads off the false idea that Magento doesn’t work for mega-sized e-commerce deployments.

Here’s how Roy Rubin responds:

”
Thanks for raising the topic. Despite my bias (clearly), a few clarifications to address here:

1) CMS – Our next enterprise release will feature a significant enhancement to our content feature set. CMS+ will allow for the creation of multiple pages, restricting publishing privileges for authorized users only and support versioning. We will also introduce Widgets (configurable page blocks) for insertion to CMS pages.

2) Customization – Our experience in working with retailers using Magento over the past 18 months has shown that less customization work is needed in most scenarios. The more unique the business model off course, the more custom code that needs to be developed. The architecture supports such enhancements without jeopardizing upgrades. This is given due the products’ rich feature set.

3) Templating – It does indeed take longer to template Magento initially (comparing to other open source solutions not proprietary). Magento’s architecture is such that it allows for template hierarchies, reuse and all this without effecting upgrades. It is to the retailers benefit/advantage.

4) Integration – I would argue that integration is rather easy. Certainly easier than 3rd party proprietary systems that are closed by design. Our web services based API certainly helps as well.

5) Target Market – Magento today is consumed by all size retailers, including Fortune 500’s, leading market brands, and billion dollar online companies. It’s important to note that on the upper end, we have retailers doing tens of thousands of orders a day.

Hope this helps and I look forward to reading additional feedback.

”

I’ve heard a lot of people complain about how complicated Magento is, but it’s usually people that are wanting a do-it-yourself solution like many of the other lesser e-commerce solutions.  Of course, once you get Magento set up, it’s one of the most user-friendly, manageable systems available for any size sales site.

The simple truth is that Magento boasts a built-in robust feature set that reflects thousands of hours of development from some of the best guys in the business, and already in the first 18 months on the market, members of the development community have contributed hundreds of extensions, evidence that they too have recognized Magento for what it is:  The herald of the next generation of e-commerce (aka, the coolest thing since broadband).  Oh, and did we mention that it’s free?

Classy Llama Studios is a consulting and development firm exclusively focused on expert Magento development and customization.  Contact us to discuss your project:  417.597.4769