Archive for May, 2009

Magento and Quickbooks

Friday, May 29th, 2009

quickbooksMany e-commerce merchants use Quickbooks, that an easy enough fact to believe. But how/can Quickbooks be integrated with Magento? Lucky for those curious, someone has already looked into the options for such an intergration.

Blueacorn has a great article listing out the options out there for any merchant looking to integrate their two most powerful tools: Quickbooks and Magento.

My past experiences with enterprise software have proven that integration projects and software can be difficult and riddled with problems. Which is probably why you see such few options available for Magento (also why we don’t develop one ourselves). This has been the number one request from our Magento clients, but again, this is certainly not something unique to Magento, most eCommerce platforms in the small to mid market rely on third party software (like T-hub and Stone Edge have done) to tie onto their software, and usually it is just a matter of time before they do.

The article lists out some options and gives a brief overview of how they work and the author’s thoughts on their functionality. The author also guarantees follow-up information that we’ll be sure to spotlight here for all SimpleHelix customers.

Community v/s Enterprise (Again)

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

We feel like we can’t express enough that Magento’s Enterprise Edition is going to be a blessing for a lot of people: But not all. We’ve directed you to a few places of information on the Magento site itself, regarding the two versions. However, we’ve discovered another site giving a good rundown of the differences for you. Creative District breaks it down simply for you:

In my experiences with Magento there’s never been anything missing from the Community addition that wasn’t available as an extension. If however you’re working as part of a large company developing an online presence then the £5k a year might not be that big an expenditure for those extra features and the support that’s there with it.

Demo Magento Enterprise Edition

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Magento recently announced the availability of an enterprise edition of their e-commerce platform.

The eCommerce Platform for Growth just got better. The Magento Enterprise Edition subscription is the premium grade Magento product, offering production-ready enterprise only features, guarantees and full product support.

Well, now they have also unveiled a demo of this Enterprise Edition. The offer the demos from the admin/control panel point of view and from the storefront itself. You have to register with Magento first to view the demos first, but we highly suggest you do this if you’re considering the switch. For those of you still considering whether or not you need to switch to the Enterprise edition, Magento also has a good comparison page here.

New Magento Release Available

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

A new Magento Release is available. You can see the release notes of 1.3.1.1 here and download the new release here. Some of the bug fixes Magento says associated with this release are listed below:

* Solved a security issue for installations of Magento that run multiple domains or sub-domains (only affects Magento installations that have more than one domain configured as Base URL)

* Added media directive to email templates filter (e.g. {{media url=”"}})

* Improved Online Customers page to prevent affecting frontend performance when this page is opened in the admin.

* Fixed “Invalid Request Error Message: Input parameter signature is invalid” after redirecting to Amazon Simple Pay

* Added Amazon payment methods titles configurable on store view scope in system configuration

CMS with Magento

Monday, May 18th, 2009

180drupal_logoMagento has an interesting tutorial discussing how to integrate a 3rd party CMS in with Magento. (Tutorial Here.) The example used in this tutorial is Expression Engine, but the tutorial points out that others (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal) could be used as well. We stumbled upon this tutorial today, adding to the seemingly endless pieces of useful information on the Magento site. If you’ll recall, we specifically discussed CMS integration with Joomla in the near future as well as a discussion of various options with integrating WordPress with Magento. All of this discussion shows how relevant the 11/2008 tutorial still is. If you’re considering integrating a CMS with your Magento site, we recommend looking into all of the options.

Magento Forums

Friday, May 15th, 2009

magento_logoWe’ve talked about the useful things the MagentoCommerce website offers in the wiki, but their forums can be just as handy. The forums are populated with users who tend to be very quick to respond to proposed questions from other users. There are also several threads dedicated solely as a sort of tutorial for other users. Here is one giving instructions about how to import categories. We definitely encourage all Magento users to come familiar with the forums.

Must-Read For Magento Beginners

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

shoppingcart Inchoo.net has a great article summing up the most common mistakes made by Magento users. It discusses problems with downloading, designing, and editing the core files (which the articles tells you NOT TO DO). Great read for anyone getting ready to jump on the Magento train! Article here.

First of all, let me inform you that this article is for those of you who are just starting with Magento. If you are a Magento expert, you will probably know this. Consider it just a reminder for those who use Magento for first time. There are three common mistakes that most people do when they try to use Magento for first time, so read this article and you won’t be one of them.:)

Roy Rubin on BlogTalk Radio

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

BlogTalk Radio interviewed Roy Rubin, founder of Varien today. The show ecom phenom interviewed the Magento head on their show today. The show hosts discussed starting on the service side of the e-commerce platform and noting what the open-source e-commerce market was lacking. This is what prompted them to creating Magento and we’ve all seen how the story goes from there. He discusses how the platform was designed from scratch after evaluating what was on the market at that time. They also discuss the newly announced Enterprise version and how it differs from the previous version.

It’s a great interview and we encourage everyone to check it out. Listen Here.

Magento Extensions

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

Nathan Smith at Creative District has a great write-up about Magento Extensions he could not live without.

As with any product Magento doesn’t cater to everyones needs out of the box and is missing quite a few things users would expect as standard. Thanks to Magento connect and a decent community following there are extensions and addons that can help you accomplish pretty much anything you like with Magento. There are a few I’ve used and really don’t know what I’d have done with out them, apart from recreating them myself!

We suggest, especially if you’re new to Magento, checking out Nathan’s article and looking at the suggestions he makes and why he uses the extensions on the list.

SimpleHELIX Joins Twitter

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

twitter_logoSimpleHELIX has finally taken the plunge to add Twitter to the ways we can communicate with current and future customers. In time we hope to use twitter to give updates on current servers, alert customers to new offers and even run contests for followers. We’d love it if you would follow us so that you can keep up with all of our updates.

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