Posts in 'Magento'

Classy Llama Studios is excited to announce that it just got easier to increase sharing and track social ROI on your Magento site!  We've partnered with AddShoppers to provide a hassle-free way to add the AddShoppers social sharing and analytics platform to your site quickly and easily. AddShoppers is an open sharing platform built for social commerce. They increase sharing by rewarding and incentivizing social actions. Meanwhile, their social analytics measure ROI and provide deep insights, for free. Retailers can identify their most social products and influencers (and sort by Klout!). For example, a retailer can see a Facebook “Like” drove 8 clicks and two of those people ordered for a total of $125.49. All you need to do to get started is: Get your free account at AddShoppers...

We've got some great news to share here at Classy Llama: Five of our developers took the Magento Certified Developer exam yesterday, and all five passed with flying colors. This brings our total count of Magento Certified Developers to nine, with seven having the distinction of the Plus certification.  This means that we have more Certified Developers than any company in the world.  We also have the privilege of being a member of the Developer Certification Board. What does this mean for the future at Classy Llama? It means we'll continue to be able to find and create dependable solutions to any need you have for your Magento eCommerce store and you'll be able to count on the solutions we provide to work as expected, without hiccups. We want to congratulate Chris, Dave, Jonathan,...

With Christmas fast-approaching, most of the llamas and their families are heading to online stores to find gifts. You already know the reasons for wanting to shop online: awesome prices, free shipping, wider selection, and not paying sales tax. Possibly most importantly: the only way to do all of your shopping in pajamas! Here at Classy Llama, we know eCommerce. Working with and building sites all day long gives us a pretty keen eye whenever we go to a site. We know what quality looks like. On the flip side of that, we also can tell when something isn't right. This past weekend when my wife plopped her laptop down beside me and asked me the question "Should I order from this site?" It prompted me to show her how I validate the occasional site that I go to that looks sketchy. This post...

Yesterday was all about X.commerce and the community at large, but today we focused solely on Magento. During the first session, we got to hear from Dmitry Soroka about what the Magento 2 roadmap looks like. Magento is putting a lot of effort into making Magento 2 a real upgrade from Magento 1: making it faster, more scalable, more expandable, more flexible, and more awesome in general. Here are some of the highlights: Backwards Compatibility is broken - Normally developers love backwards compatibility because it makes our lives easier: we don't have to update code every time a new version comes out. However, this time around, Magento has decided to forgo it. This is actually a very good key decision. Now, they have the chance to fix some important architecture problems that would...

[By the way, if you haven't already, you should check out our blog post about the Skype Extension we wrote for Alfred that allows to send Skype messages with Alfred.] Alfred has featured our Skype Extension on their new support site as one of their team picks. I received this sweet email from Anna Manasova, the Community and Marketing Director for Alfred: Hi Kevin, Just wanted to drop you a quick line and say thanks for creating a brilliant Alfred extension. We've now launched a new support site for Alfred and with it a section showcasing some of the best user-created extensions (including yours!). I use Skype everyday so yours is very useful. You can find our extension on the "Every Day Useful" extension page.

Good golly, what a day! So much ground was covered today. It would be really hard to talk about every single thing that happened today, but we'd like to share we you some cool...

On Tuesday, a few of us llamas will be heading over to San Francisco to attend to the Innovate Developer's Conference. We're really excited to be a part of this conference for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, we're enthusiastic about the potential the X.commerce platforms brings to the Magento and eCommerce communities. It is a very ambitious end-to-end, multi-channel platform that aims to make the constantly changing and evolving world of eCommerce easy to access. On top of that, it's open source! We'll be watching this story unfold and can't wait to see the fruit: what makes it into Magento and what features and services will be born out of this platform that can help us more effectively serve our customers and make them more successful. Secondly, we are glad to hear that...

This post outlines some of our thoughts about the state of the Magento module community, and an idea for how Magento can improve the quality of that community. This post outlines some of our thoughts about the state of the Magento module community, and an idea for how Magento can improve the quality of that community. Here at Classy Llama Studios we create our own Magento modules every day and have high standards for any module that we write.  These standards include having properly commented code, adhering to Zend programming standards, and having both the code and functionality of the module reviewed before it is released.  Magento is great because, instead of having to write every module that we use, there are numerous other quality development companies whose modules we can draw from...

The latest batch of Wiz updates includes some useful stuff for developers as well as some administrative features. Included in this bundle of Wizzy goodness is the ability to output any table output in csv, pipe, or tab delimited output. This makes it very easy to utilize Wiz with other commands (or potentially feed information from Wiz back into itself!) Here is a complete list of the changes in 0.9.5: The internal configuration system was rewritten to look more like Magento's own configuration system -- using XML files. This isn't really used heavily yet, but we've got some stuff coming in the next few months that will take full advantage of this. You can now toggle the following "developer" flags from the CLI: Allow Symlinks (For templates, 1.5.1.0+) Logging JS Merging CSS Merging...

We've been doing a ton of work on documentation around llamaville lately, and since many of us working here are programmer types, most of our doc systems are configured to use the Markdown markup language (link) for writing richly formatted content. This is great, with one small problem - our project management system doesn't currently support Markdown. It uses a WYSIWYG editor, or can take straight HTML input. I strongly dislike WYSIWYG editors, as they are slow and difficult to work with in my experience, and writing HTML directly is also time consuming and laborious. Life has ben rough, until last night when I stumbled across a little gem of a program: Pandoc by John McFarlane (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/). Pandoc is a beautiful little markup converter that can convert just...