Stephan Miller
Building Websites, Traffic, and Income
Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook Review
This is the third Magento book I have reviewed at this blog. The first book took a beginner through the basics of adding products to and running a Magento store and not much more. The second book was for Magento Developers interested in extending Magento’s functionality. So both of those books covered the “build it” part of running an online store with Magento. And this book covered the “and they will come” part of running your store.
A Review of Magento 1.3: PHP Developer’s Guide
- Image via Wikipedia
Let me guess. You’re an in-house ecommerce developer. About a year or so ago you heard about this slick ecommerce software called Magento. You’re skeptical but you see a large community and free extensions. So you think you can make it work.
Yeah, you can start with that default Magento theme. It’s better than that crappy table driven one you are currently using with osCommerce anyway. So you start with the default theme. And all is well until you try to get that stupid dog picture off of the sidebar. Some of you might have just stopped there and I can’t say that wasn’t a wise choice. But for those of you who stuck with it, this is probably only the first WTF moments in a long line with Magento.
What’s New with Magento
First, let me tell you that I will soon be receiving the Magento 1.3 PHP Developer’s Guide to review. Magento has an architecture link no other software. Hopefully this book sheds some light on developing with Magento and beats hunting a pecking through the forums. The last book I bought for a CMS was one for Drupal. With WordPress, I picked up everything I know online.
Using Technology to Assist in eCommerce Targeting
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Guest post by Craig Smith of Trinity Insight
Within the Ecommerce marketplace, new technologies have been developed to assist online retailers in properly messaging content and promotions to different users. These "targeting" solutions help improve the "holy grail" metric of conversion and should be evaluated and potentially included within your store.
What these types of offerings provide is the ability to customize a user session based upon data that is stored within the user cookie. Without diving into the ins and outs of cookies and their functionality, essentially cookies allow a web browser to decipher the geo-location of a user, if a user has been to a site previously, as well as what pages the user has been to and where the user dropped off.
Magento Beginner’s Guide
Image by Guido Jansen via Flickr
Building an online store is not a walk in the park and I have developed a lot of them with osCommerce, ZenCart and even X-cart. Then I ran into Magento which has more potential than all three.
But that doesn’t mean it is necessarily the easiest software to use. Anything that runs smooth and looks good on the frontend does have a lot going on in the backend. And Magento does take some getting used to. And Magento’s Beginner’s Guide is a great place to start. While it won’t take you through all the complex procedures of building multiple store or using Magento’s API, it will show you how to get a store up and running. And it truly is a beginner’s guide, walking you through each step with annotated screenshots.
My Magento Bookmarks
Image by Guido Jansen via Flickr
It is still my plan to create a subdomain to host all of my posts on ecommerce. I have a lot of material. It is what I do most of the day. But for now, I will continue to put them here.
Magento is software for running an e-Commerce site. Yesterday I wrote a post on Magento for Search Engine Journal. I mentioned in that article that I had about 60 threads bookmarked in the forums. These threads really helped me modify 4 Magento installations. I also have a few bookmarks from elsewhere. Considering that the only book on developing for Magento leaves a lot up in the air, I figured I would write this post. It may help a few people.
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