Well, some time has gone by since we released our last extension. But the waiting has an end now. We are happy to announce the release of our latest extension within the velite family, called Superflow for Magento.
 
If you own an iPod or an iPhone you might already be familiar with the extension’s concept. Superflow lets you highlight featured products. You can embed it for example on your store’s homepage. Basically Superflow has all features included you might already know from our quite popular extension Magento Productslider. This means it already has features like scoping (“multiple instances”) included. And besides that it provides many new features like setting the colors of each panel or interactive element as well as JavaScript callbacks. So this extension is highly customizable and brings fun, for you and your clients.
 
Enough said, check out the Superflow Demo. Magento Superflow is available from now on for an amount of USD 99,00 per single license.

As you might know Varien is going to release Magento 1.4 stable in this month. In 1.4 there are a couple of changes that infect extensions like ours. So it’s important for you to know which versions of our extensions are compatible with Magento 1.4 and which are not.

Teaserbox: All versions above/equal 1.2 are Magento 1.4 compatible
Productslider: All versions above/equal 1.6 are Magento 1.4 compatible
Superstage: All versions above/equal 1.5 are Magento 1.4 compatible

It’s very important to only use compatible versions together with Magento 1.4. Using older extension versions on Magento 1.4 shops will lead to problems.

As we already mentioned in the last post, we have released a new version of our Magento Productslider extension, which is currently 1.5.3.
 
First of all, we did some code refactoring and elminated bugs that customers told us about. Beside that, the biggest improvement is the possibility of multiple sliders within your store, we call it "scoping". That means, that it is now possible to embed the Productslider on different shop pages and show different products in each one. We differ in target-based scoping and category-based scoping. You can read more about this in the updated Productslider documentation.
 
If you are already a customer of us and purchased a copy of Magento Productslider you can send us an E-Mail with your personal serial number, to get a copy of the latest Productslider version. We also provide an updated documentation on how to handle the new features. If you wish to, we do the update process for an update fee of 50 USD.

That’s a good question indeed. You might haven’t heard from us for a while now, at least when you don’t follow us on Twitter. Well, some things were going on in our private lifes… so, for my part I relocated to Stuttgart City and Simon took some time-out in France. However, I write this blog post to get you up-to-date and let you know what happened and what’s on our roadmap for the next months.

Magento Teaserbox

First of all, our Magento Teaserbox extension surpassed 1.500 downloads. That’s even more than we expected. Thanks to everyone giving us positive feedback, we even want to thank these ones who made us almost go mad by weird support requests. That made us learn how we won’t handle Community Extensions in future.

Magento Productslider

The next news is concerning our Magento Productslider extension. Simon just finished debugging and test runs for the release 1.5.3 which contains some nice new features like the usage of multiple sliders within your store (we call it “scoping”) or the option to disable watermarking, in case you make use of that.

Website Relaunch

Another big milestone is the upcoming relaunch of our corporate website velite.de, which will be totally implemented on Magento Software. We’re currently doing the screendesign and its layout grids. The relaunch will hopefuly go live in the mid of november, bringing you the advantages of Magento and even more great features.

Meet Magento

Well, we will participate in the Magento event Meet Magento on November 2nd in Frankfurt, Germany. We’re kinda excited to meet all the people, we already got in contact with virtually and those we heard about. There will be some real nice speeches, too many to take part in all of them. Just having the hope to see online screencasts afterwards.

Miscellaneous

We will for sure update our extensions Magento Superstage and Teaserbox as well. There will be a commercial version of Teaserbox available, as we already published some weeks ago. New extensions are also to be done, the next one will be Magento Mediabox, which handles the product images and its thumbnails in a nicer way than Magento default does it. Well, that’s it so far.
 
- Markus

As a Magento developer it’s necessary to have some good and updated online resources around. Really useful Magento Blogs are pretty rare, we have summarized the essential ones which we regularly read on ourselves. So, be sure to take a look at the following Blogs, some of them are more advanced and active than others. If you know any more Magento Developer Blogs, go ahead and write down a comment.
 
Sometimes Blog authors might discuss approaches and concepts regarding Magento development, and suggest modifying core code to illustrate their approach. Please be aware, that you should never do that on a live store – you will lose the ability to upgrade your installation without breaking that feature. Always capsule your changes in a Magento module.

International Blogs

1. ActiveCodeline

Branko Ajzele is working full time as a Senior Web Developer at Inchoo. He is furthermore the initiator and owner of snippi.net and writes about Magento coding. Visit Branko Ajzele’s Magento Blog…

2. Baobaz

The Baobaz guys, based in France and Poland, write about Magento in general, Magento modules, extensions and templates and Magento related Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Visit Baobaz Magento Blog…

3. Developer Zone

Josh Pratt is a web developer in Bloomington, Minnesota – working at a company called August Ash. Currently, he is most involved in learning and implementing Magento. Visit Josh Pratt’s Magento Blog…

4. Fontis

Fontis is a team of passionate developers and IT professionals from Australia. They’re quite famous for their free Magento Community Extensions, like the WYSIWYG editor. Visit Fontis Magento Blog…

5. Inchoo

Inchoo is a developer studio from Croatia, specializing in developing eCommerce solutions using Magento as a platform for most of their projects. Visit Inchoo’s Magento Blog…

6. Richard Castera

Richard Castera is an Application Developer and Designer from New York. He provides nice and useful tips as well as code snippets for the Magento Community. Visit Richard Castera’s Magento Blog…

7. Robertson & Associates

Robertson & Associates is basically a creative agency based in Abingdon, United Kingdom. They write about Magento in general and coding. Visit Robertson & Associates Magento Blog…

8. Official Magento Blog

There’s nothing much to say, the official Magento Blog brings you the official stuff at first hand. It’s less useful for practises than for getting general information about the system. Visit the Official Magento Blog…

9. MageDev

“MageDev” is a Magento developer and Zend PHP 5 certified engineer from Manchester, United Kingdom. He’s writing about solutions for problems which pop up in his daily Magento life. Visit MageDev’s Magento Blog…

German Blogs

10. Magento Experts

Johannes Teitge and Daniel Sasse run this Magento Blog, writing tutorials and about extensions. It’s too bad, that this Blog is only available in German so far. Visit Magento Experts Blog…

11. ITABS

Alexander Steireif and Rouven Rieker offer solutions and write about contemporary topics in their Corporate Blog regarding Magento. They should start being more active again. Visit ITABS Magento Blog…

Welcome to the third part of our series "Magento Templates with style". We irregular collect beautiful e-commerce templates based on Magento to give you some inspiration about what is possible with this piece of open-source software we all do like. You might also want to take a look at the first or the second blog post. We hope you enjoy the following Magento store designs. Here we go!

Zend Store

Kaenon

Dainese

BELLYSHADES

Flockstoff

Zumiez

Miniface

Hype DC

Ctrl Technology

Etiqueta Blanca

We are very happy to annouce, that we have released a new Community Extension called Magento Teaserbox – the best thing about it, it’s totally free. The extension is available on Magento Connect and has surpassed 100 downloads in total already.

 
So, if you are interested in a flash based Magento extension which can handle easily your recently added or featured products, this module might be the right tool for your needs. The possibilities are almost boundless. Features like auto-sliding your images the vertical or horizontal way within a specific time period, which you can define within the Magento backend, are implemented. Find more features on the product page itself. If you have any trouble, just take a look at the official extension forums and skim the threads or open a new one. You will also find a showcase thread where you can post your store’s URL containing Magento Teaserbox. Now take a look at the demo.

One of the things you have to deal with when switching from another e-commerce software to Magento are URL redirects. Over the past years you (hopefully) received many incoming deep links. You surely know that incoming links are one of the main ranking factors for most search engines. So when you switch to another e-commerce software, these deep links get useless because they point to subpages that don’t exist (unless you don’t have the exact same URL structure in your new shop). The common way to solve this issue is just to do a 301 redirect (permantly redirect) from the old URLs to the new ones. You have the possibility to define the redirects in your .htaccess file or with the Magentos build-in “URL Rewrite Management” (in the Backend “Catalog” -> “URL Rewrite Management”).

However, both of these methods have some disadvantages. The .htaccess file could be overwritten when you update Magento. Also if you change the URL structure inside Magento you’ll have to update the .htaccess file each time. The Magento build-in Tool is nice if you only have to do a couple of rewrites. But let’s say you have 2000 or more redirects you want to define… you can take a week off, because you have to define each redirect manually.

I decided to write a small extension to give you an alternative way of defining redirects. Just named it “Massredirect”. You can download it here. For installation just copy it into your Magento main folder and run the command “tar -xvf massredirect.tar”. This will extract the extension files to the desired places. Before you start defining the redirects, make sure you got rid of the cache and the extension shows up in the advanced tab of the configuration site. To define the redirects open the CSV file “redirects.csv” located in the folder “/app/code/local/Velite/Massredirect/etc/” in a text editor. Each row in the CSV defines a redirect. Basically there are two possibilties of defining a redirect:

Possbility 1:

old-URL;type;entity_id;website_id;store_id

for example:

www.myshop.com/product.php?productid=123;product;5;1;1

This will redirect a user typing the URL “www.myshop.com/product.php?productid=123″ to the product page of the product with the ID 5 on the default website and store. Notice that the URL must be specified without “http://”. “type” can either be “product” or “category”.

Possbility 2:

old-URL;new-URL

for example:

www.myshop.com/product.php?productid=123;www.myshop.com/my-nice-product.html

Keep in mind that the second possbility has the same disadvantage like defining the redirects in the .htaccess file. This means, if you change the URL structure inside of Magento you will also have to update the CSV. However, you can mix both possibilities in the CSV file.

So how does this extension work?

Basically the preDispatch method of the Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Action gets observed (the event is named “controller_action_predispatch”). If the requested action is “noRoute”, the CSV gets parsed and looked up if there is a mapping available for the typed-in URL. In that case the user (or the bot) gets redirected to the new URL (with a Status 301-Redirect).

Feel free to make any further suggestions.

This is a tiny collection of Twitter accounts that do tweet about anything concerning Magento and even much more. Some are more active than others, but the selection represents Twitter feeds that are really worth to follow. Even we didn’t put ourself into the list we are also happy about each new follower. If you think you should be mentioned here as well, get in contact with us. Okay, so let’s get it started.

Magento Official (1)

• Follow Magento from Los Angeles, California. [English]
  The official Twitter account from Magento Commerce by Varien.

Magento Developers (10)

• Follow Inchoo from Croatia. [English]
  Inchoo is a web development company working with Magento.
• Follow MageParts from Sweden. [English]
  MageParts is a Magento Extension developer team.
• Follow Ross Kendall from Scarborough, UK. [English]
  Ross Kendall is a web developer for Magento and Drupal.
• Follow Richard Castera from the USA. [English]
  Richard Castera is a application developer and web ninja.
• Follow Orta Therox from somewhere. [English]
  I have no further information, but he’s giving good tips anyway.
• Follow FOOMAN from Auckland, New Zealand. [English]
  Magento expert and founder of FOOMAN tweets about Magento.
• Follow Roy Andre from Norway. [English]
  Roy Andre writes about Premium Magento themes and widgets.
• Follow Seeds Commerce from Groningen, Netherlands. [English]
  Seeds Commerce are Magento specialists and Extension developers.
• Follow Vinai from Heidelberg, Germany. [German]
  Vinai is a freelancing Magento dude and developer from Germany.
• Follow Yireo from Amsterdam, Netherlands. [English]
  Yireo are building bridges between platforms and share knowlegde.

Magento Blogs (2)

• Follow Webshop News from Germany. [English, German]
  One of the best German Magento blogs about news, trends and tips.
• Follow Blueacorn from South Carolina, USA. [English]
  CEO of Blue Acorn is writing about Magento and E-Commerce.

Magento Community (5)

• Follow #magento from the internet. [English]
  Hashbot finds news about Magento and retweets them.
• Follow Branko Ajzele from Croatia. [English]
  Branko Ajzele from inchoo writes about updates on Snippi.net.
• Follow Magento Tips from Cape Town, South Africa. [English]
  General and useful tips and tricks for Magento.
• Follow MageTips from the UK. [English]
  Get unofficial hints and tips for your Magento Community Edition.
• Follow Dutchento from the Netherlands. [English]
  This is the official feed of the Dutch Magento Community.

Magento Agencies (7)

• Follow Alexander Ringsdorff from Germany. [German]
  Alexander Ringsdorff, CEO of Visions, writes Magento related tweets.
• Follow Boris Lokschin from Hannover, Germany. [English, German]
  The CEO and founder of symmetrics GmbH tweets about Magento.
• Follow Pod1 from London and New York. [English]
  Magento Commerce store designers and developers.
• Follow Netformic from Stuttgart, Germany. [German]
  German Magento agency from Stuttgart.
• Follow netz98 from Mainz, Germany. [German]
  German Magento agency from Mainz.
• Follow mzentrale from Stuttgart, Germany. [German]
  German Magento agency from Stuttgart.
• Follow Leftfield Digital from London, UK. [English]
  Magento agency based in London.

We are proud to announce that we finally finished the work on our new Magento extension. Magento Superstage is a flash based fullscreen gallery that is intended for showcasing high resolution products images. Present your products in a completely new way within your Magento store! You can’t wait to see the Magento Superstage in action? Check out the Superstage demo and its features. Magento Superstage is available for an amount of only 49 US Dollar.

Yes, we have just created a velite™ page on Facebook. We would like to get in closer contact and even to strengthen the relationship to you, our customers and friends. Now it’s your turn to become a fan and to add us to your friendlist on Facebook. Follow these links for further information. Take a look at the corporate velite™ page on Facebook or visit the profiles of Simon Kusterer and Markus Müller, the founders and owners of velite™. We are looking forward to seeing you on Facebook.

We did not stop researching into beautiful Magento Templates for sure, so we found another 10 fancy stores with real style. This is the sequel to the first blog post about neat Magento themes. We hope you enjoy the selection and get some inspiration for your own projects. However, stay tuned for part 3.

Better Closet

Dripping in fat

Fred Perry

Massivum

Pebblehill Designs

Schattenspender 24

Asphaltgold

Hanger Project

Donna Ida

Candle City

Magento Experts (Mxperts) is the number one Magento related Blog in Germany. Today they released a Magento extension that allows you to easily load jQuery into your Magento store. You just have to install the extension and jQuery gets automatically loaded. In the configuration menu of your Magento backend there is a new section, where you can enable different settings like loading jQuery in the minified/compressed way or turning on/off the conflict mode. The extension keeps your jQuery version up-to-date but also allows you to specify a certain jQuery version to be loaded.

I was actually interested in how the extension places the jQuery script-tag into the html header. So I had a look into the source code. What they basically do is overriding the block Mage_Page_Block_Html_Head with their own Mxperts_Jquery_Block_Page_Html_Head. Within their custom block they override the getCssJsHtml() method and append their script-tags inside of it. At the the end they call the getCssJsHtml() method of the parent class Mage_Page_Block_Html_Head, merge their script tags with the rest of the head content and finally return it. The extension does perfectly what it was made for. Mxperts did a great job indeed!

I know it’s very common to override core classes within Magento extensions. I just asked myself what happens if two or more extensions override the same core class. To test what happens, I created a little extenstion with a block class which overrides the Mage_Page_Block_Html_Head class (just like the jQuery extension does). As I already supposed, only one override has effect in this case.

This means, the more extensions (which modify a core class) you install in your Magento Admin Panel, the bigger is the risk that two extensions override the same core class. In order to solve such a conflict I guess you either have to merge both conflicting classes into one single class or you chain the classes (ExtensionClassA extends Core Class and ExtensionClassB extends ExtensionA). Somehow this is a big lack in Magento extension development in my opinion. Please correct me if I’m missing something.

Since its release in 2007, Magento Commerce has grown to an established open source software solution in todays e-commerce business. One of the reasons is for sure its great amount of features, from a customer’s point of view as well as for its unlimited administrative abilities provided. There are many Magento stores out there, but not all of them come along with a really nice template or neat extensions. We have selected a contemporary Top 10 of Magento Templates with class and style. You may already know some of them, but these are still unbeaten regarding to their visual concept and user experience. So, let’s have a look at the stores.

Matthew Williamson

This is the online store of the luxury fashion house Matthew Williamson from London. It’s modern, colorful and minimalistic in its design – a perfect match for a fashion online store. Pod1 based in London and New York manufactured this beautiful Magento store.
 

Hello Lucky

The Magento store of Hello Lucky offers wedding invitations, gifts and stationery. The products are as lovely as the shop design itself. Beautiful illustrations with love for details lead the way and make it fun browsing.
 

Jack Wolfskin

The Jack Wolfskin online shop offers outdoor equipment. A puristic design with an intuitive navigation offers some nice filters for a better and even faster navigation. None other than Visions did take care of the store’s implemention.
 

Idahoan

The Idahoan store comes with a nice retro look, that suggests good and homemade quality from the good old days. Idahoan is one of the worlds leading producers of dehydrated potatoes. Be sure to take a look at the recipes section.
 

Eagle Coffee

The Eagle Coffee Company Magento store perfectly matches its needs – fresh roasted coffee beans from all over the world for sale. Well implemented layout grid with good usability and fast loading pages.
 

Got Mojo

The Got Mojo online store is basically a T-Shirt company based in Glasgow. The design is clear, simple and modern. So the focus is set on the products themselfs. Some fancy extensions would make it even better.
 

Tivoli Audio

The Czech Tivoli Audio Magento store offers audio, hi-fi and radio equipment. The layout grid is simple but comes with style. We would be happy to see some more functionality on the product images.
 

MDCUK

The Mens Designer Clothing UK online store provides a wide range of well known clothing brands. The layout grid is simple and clearly arranged, fast loading pages. Responsible for the store’s implementation was Blackout Media from North Wales.
 

Tools Store

The only layout which is available for sale on Template Monster so far. Even this layout is basically designed for selling tools, we think its arrangement is quite modular and that the layout grid could be easily revised for selling everything.
 

Kumo

The KUMO Lifestyle online store offers exclusively genuine lightning from Japan and other living accessories. The frontend is completely based on Flash which makes the shop special in its features and appearance. Made by Web Arts from Germany.
 

Customers, newsletter subscribers and Twitter followers already had the chance to take a look at our upcoming extension Magento Superstage, which is currently running as Beta. Now you have the chance as well to get an insight on what is coming the next days on Magento Connect. Bounce to the Magento Superstage ^BETA page.

The author Ed Baxter from Sheffield did a great job by creating the screencast "Easy E-Commerce With Magento" for Nettuts+. He demonstrates basic steps and processes how to get started with Magento such as how to download and install Magento to a local host and then configure Magento Store options. He also describes how to create simple, configurable products and categories. The screencast is assisted by a bunch of screenshots coming with short notices. Altogether a nice tutorial for getting into the basics of Magento Commerce.

Varien just released the new Magento version 1.3.2.2 about 6 hours ago. It is now available for download and upgrade. This release includes issue resolution for Magento version 1.3.x. Take a look at the original article on magentocommerce.com or you may want to see the full list of changes on the release notes page.

You want to start coding your own Magento extension and you are frustrated because Varien doesn’t provide a documentation? I also don’t have any documentation for you :-). But what helped me getting started are these Code-Snippets on snippi.net. The Website is run by Branko Ajzele. His blog is also a good ressource to get information about extension programming for Magento.