Shopping Cart & Ecommerce Blog » General

Magento Themes eBook

Mark — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 12:18:01 +0000

The good folks at Packt Publishing were kind enough to give me a copy of their new book, “Magento 1.4 Theming Cookbook”. This is particularly relevant to me at the moment as I’m building a Magento site at the moment.

The subtitle is “Over 40 recipes to create a full functional, feature rich, customized Magento theme”. This gives a clue as the the nature of the book – this isn’t a tutorial/how to book. There is a bit of theory, but mostly it’s right into very practical step by step solutions. You have a problem, or want to learn new tricks, this is the place to do it. It’s more a reference book, the sort of thing you’ve have sitting near by and open when you get stuck or want some best advice help, including code samples ready to copy and paste.

Topics include how to create a theme from scratch, how to modify an existing theme, more advanced theme stuff like light boxes and Cufon, and then into building simple extensions and localization. For those wanting to really get into themes there’s even a section on how to sell themes.

Certainly a few sections in this book very relevant to my project (I want to use Cufon for example), so it’s great to have around. A good book for all current and aspiring Magento developers.

X.Commerce Hype Grows

Mark — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 02:25:04 +0000

There’s been more hype about the X.Commerce Platform (on the impressive www.x.com domain). Details are still a bit sketchy, but it’s somehow aggregating all the Ebay properties – Ebay itself, Paypal and Magento. No word on GSI being involved yet but we’ll see. They’ve also partnered with the Kenshoo enterprise bid management platform, and Adobe’s Site Catalyst analytics platform (formerly Omniture).

However, it’s hard to get a straight answer as to what it actually is, which is unfortunately pretty typical of such products. After all,

Itâ€™s more than e-commerce. More than marketing automation. More than mobile transactions. Itâ€™s the first end-to-end, multi-channel commerce technology platform designed for all the ways consumers choose to shop today. And itâ€™s the only platform that combines the power of eBay, PayPal, Magento, and all the ground-breaking commerce capabilities within the eBay Inc. family.

Doesn’t exactly say a lot. Best I can tell it’s a series of cloud based APIs that enable a bunch of common and growing ecommerce functions such as authentication, payments, mobile payments, checkout, reporting and more. I think it’s the evolution of the PayPal API, but not really clear.

Any seen a good summary?

Webhost4life Review

Mark — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:31:55 +0000

I don’t like doing this, but sometimes it has to be done.

This site used to be hosted with Webhost4life. In their “platform migration” they messed up this site so badly it took me hours and hours to get them to fix it. Apologies to those who experienced all the downtime inflicted by them.

They have done exactly the same with another site I look after. Isolated incident? Hardly.

http://www.webhostingstuff.com/review/webhost4lifecom.html (dozens of BAD reviews)
http://webhost4lifecustomers.ning.com/ (a support site for people having troubles!)
http://fhemsher.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html (class action lawsuit)
http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/118/threadid/380528/scope/posts/Default.aspx
http://amplicate.com/hate/webhost4life
http://www.webutation.org/en/review/webhost4life.com
http://www.knowledgesutra.com/forums/topic/63377-webhost4life-sucks/

I could post literally dozens more links. Just avoid Webhost4life like the plague. I’m glad to see the back of them.

Free Shopping Cart Images

Mark — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 01:58:12 +0000

I bumped into this nice collection of ecommerce icons. A nice collection of shopping carts, payment types, and other images to spruce up your ecommerce site.

Thanks to my friends at The Complete Basketcase for the link.

Online Retailer 2010 Sydney

Mark — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 07:14:44 +0000

Anyone planning to attend Online Retailer in Sydney next week (6 – 9 July), give me a yell. I’ll be there much of the day (not all day) on Tuesday6 and Wednesday 7 of July. I’ll be doing a talk about shopping carts on the Wednesday morning. Make sure you say hi!

Are Get Elastic re-writing history?

Mark — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 12:41:19 +0000

I’m a fan of the Get Elastic blog. However, I just saw something a bit odd today. They used to have a post about the optimum number of steps in a checkout process.

This image is copied from that post:

However, this post has now vanished. They’ve had a one page checkout since 2006 but have recently been touting their success with it.

Conspiracy? Something else? Who knows. Seems a bit strange though!

Plug for CLL

Mark — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:11:20 +0000

A shameless plug. My Dad had CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia) and against all odds beat it using diet. This is a blatant plug/link juice for his site on CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia).

I’m on Twitter

Mark — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:45:41 +0000

You can follow me on Twitter if you are into that Mostly talking about general online marketing stuff with an ecommerce bent.

“Top 10 eCommerce Startup Mistakes”

Mark — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 04:38:19 +0000

I just came across this great article on mistakes startups make. As I was reading it, I was nodding my head a lot, thinking, yup, I’ve seen that. I was going to put a “I really agree with point number X” here, but I really strongly agree with about 7 out of 10 of them! (and the other 3 aren’t ones I disagree with, just less common in my experience). Definitely worth a read!

Cheap SSL

Mark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:30:19 +0000

Got a mention of an interesting product for people looking for an ecommerce solution. Name Cheap have an entry level domain/SSL product that has potential. Worth checking out for those on a tight budget.

Thanks to Michelle.