The items on this list are essential for any store owner to go through before launching their online store. We’ve covered some of these topics before and this post is to serve as a must-be checklist in order to ensure flawless user experience.
Note: This post is dedicated to the store owners in general, mainly without any technical knowledge in terms of web development. Thanks.
Finally Magento 1.4.1.0 has been released. Its been “forever” since we got stuck with Magento 1.4.0.1. Anyhow, its always nice to have updated, bug fixed, and a bit improved version of your software. Especially if it brings money to your table. Hope all of you site owners will enjoy this new release.
However, keep in mind that upgrade will not be painless. On contrary, I expect lot of issues with lot of custom extensions coded around the “Sales” functionality. Reason for this is the “Sales module database structure changed from EAV into flat tables”. Hopefully you, the site owner, can spare several hundred of dollars for the upgrade. So please, as I developer all I can say is be gentle on us if your site snaps during the upgrade process 
.
Besides the obvious (read usual) bug fixes, there were several other under the hood changes and improvements such as updated version of TinyMCE, ability to exclude a category from navigation menu, ability to use static URLs for media in WYSIWYG or image browser and other neat stuff.
My favorite change is the one related to the PayPal section. Seems like finally someone decided to organize this stuff under one menu item, you know the one under System > Configuration > Sales > PayPal. Not much but it makes people like me happy.
My apologize if I left a bit sarcastic impression. Thats just me , and my sincere need to express my self from time to time. Besides, speed aside is there any serious shop alternative when it comes to features for Magento?
By now, everybody that reads this blog has probably heard of upcoming Google TV, a device that is set to revolutionize the broadcasting industry and finally take it to the next step – the world of actual two way interaction. Since we deal with e-commerce here at inchoo, the first thing that popped into my head when I saw what Google TV is was its effect on e-commerce world.
Since Google TV will be able to run Android apps, what should we actually call this kind of shopping – e-commerce, m-commerce or tv-commerce? Well, first of all, your TV is not very mobile, so I guess m-commerce is disqualified as a valid name, no matter it can run apps initially intended for mobile use. E-commerce should be a pretty valid name, since your TV will be connected with the internet so you are actually buying via the internet. I think tv-commerce or TVcommerce would be the most proper name, but it could get confused with “old tv-commerce”.
This is a guest post, originally published by Philippe Humeau which he was kind enough to translate to English and allow us to publish it here. I found this post awesome and really wanted it to be shared with much broader audience in English language.
NBS System is a managed hosting company working mainly on Magento so they have a lot of Magento hosted to put it short (~200 sites). They also maintain a blog regarding Magento optimization and this is a translated post from it (Wikigento):
Here is a small contribution of the support and commercial best phones call, along with other « real life » experiences. The worst questions, the silliest ideas, the best wills hybridized with the worst technical solutions, just see by yourselves.
PS : We always laugh with no bad intentions. Every jobs has it stakes, constraints and problems, one’s difficulty is not to be laughed at but our day-to-day life can be rejoiced by some juicy results ! We also make mistakes, who don’t
Magento 1.4+ includes a nice feature that allowed you to throw the store into “maintenance mode” if you need to do/work or make changes. Which is great, freeze people out of the store while you work or make changes. The only problem with this, is it also freezes YOU out of the store so you can’t make the changes you need to. So here is a little bit of code, that allows you and other you set to work on the site while everyone else sees its maintenance mode.
All we need to do it edit 3 lines.
Open: index.php in root and above line 57 add (remembering to edit the ‘allowed’ array to contain the IP’s you want to be able to access the site);
