John Roa » The Blog

Oh, Magento …

For those of you that are still living in the Stone Age (or those of you who don’t spend their free time researching open-source e-commerce platforms), Magento is a groundbreaking piece of software that basically splits the gap between the dated, functionality-deprived open-source platforms and the big, sexy (read: expensive) enterprise systems. Magento lands at a nice spot in the mid-market sector and having been downloaded 600,000+ times since it’s alpha release in the beginning of Q2, has certainly made quite the buzz in the e-retail community.

Having used Magento since it’s first public beta, I feel like I have been raising a child not unlike myself: absentmindedly-sophisticated-with-a-hint-of-logical-defiance. My relationship with Magento is the epitome of love / hate. We have had our beautiful moments when I realize my checkout process is just screaming high conversions and plugging-in with a third-party service is as simple as supplying API credentials. Other times, the only thing I’ve hated more then Magento are the software it was built to replace (read: x-cart, OS Commerce).

Magento makes the complex tasks simple and the straightforward tasks absolutely torturous .. for example:

Want to create a turn-key multi-channel e-retail store with guided navigation, single-page AJAX checkout, dynamic merchandising, complex promotions and a powerful data input/output engine? NO PROBLEM!!

Want to remove test orders from the database / backend? NO PROBLEM ……… just run this SQL query against your database:

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SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;TRUNCATE `catalogsearch_query`;  -- added
 
TRUNCATE `catalogsearch_result`;  -- added
TRUNCATE `log_quote`;
TRUNCATE `report_event`;
TRUNCATE `sales_flat_order_item`;
TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote`;
TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote_address`;
TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote_address_item`;
TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote_item`;
TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote_item_option`;
TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote_payment`; -- added
TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote_shipping_rate`; -- added
TRUNCATE `sales_order`;
TRUNCATE `sales_order_datetime`;
TRUNCATE `sales_order_decimal`;
TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity`;
TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_datetime`;
TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_decimal`;
TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_int`;
TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_text`;
TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_varchar`;
TRUNCATE `sales_order_int`;
TRUNCATE `sales_order_tax`;  -- added
TRUNCATE `sales_order_text`;
TRUNCATE `sales_order_varchar`;
TRUNCATE `sendfriend_log`;
TRUNCATE `tag`;
TRUNCATE `tag_relation`;
TRUNCATE `tag_summary`;
TRUNCATE `wishlist`;
TRUNCATE `wishlist_item`;  -- added
-- reset customers
TRUNCATE `customer_address_entity`;
TRUNCATE `customer_address_entity_datetime`;
TRUNCATE `customer_address_entity_decimal`;
TRUNCATE `customer_address_entity_int`;
TRUNCATE `customer_address_entity_text`;
TRUNCATE `customer_address_entity_varchar`;
TRUNCATE `customer_entity`;
TRUNCATE `customer_entity_datetime`;
TRUNCATE `customer_entity_decimal`;
TRUNCATE `customer_entity_int`;
TRUNCATE `customer_entity_text`;
TRUNCATE `customer_entity_varchar`;
TRUNCATE `log_customer`;
TRUNCATE `log_visitor`;
TRUNCATE `log_visitor_info`;
-- Reset all ID counters
-- Some payment gateways need a unique transaction reference for every order,
-- reseting your order ID may result in future transaction errors!
-- (so only do this if you are sure it wont be a problem)
-- TRUNCATE `eav_entity_store`;
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1;

No folks, not kidding.

(This criticism isn’t completely fair … but …) I suppose you cannot expect a company whose revenue model is built off support to make their product too easy to use.

At the end of the day, it is still an great piece of open-source software that is only getting better and will pave the way for many new and established e-commerce properties. I for one will continue our box-of-chocolates / Freddy Krueger relationship until something better comes along.

A blog post from the powers that be over at the search giant have explained the development of new algorithms to crawl embedded Adobe Flash and pull out textual content.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog

about the Searchable SWF integration.

Flash has been an SEO black hole since it was introduced, and this is certainly a major development in the ability to mix the interactive technology with SEO-friendly sites.

Read full article

I was with a colleague last night playing the “.com name game” for an upcoming project. We felt we needed some inspiration, so I sent out a text message to about 20 of my friends saying:

First reaction – don’t think about it – send back the first fun word you think of

Here are the responses, in order received:

• Jewish
• Boobs
• <censored>
• Fun bags
• Yermom
• Teezey
• Tits
• Boobs
• Tits and ass
• Armadillo

If that isn’t inspirational, I don’t know what is. Go team go!

Google Analytics, our favorite free website analytics system, has recently released an update to their tracking code which brings with it a number of new features.

The code has gone through an update from this:

To this:

What changes can we expect from implementing this new code? The Official Google Analytics blog reports:

1. Compare two metrics against each other to see how they correlate
2. Support for the long awaited Tracking API
3. New e-commerce tracking features
4. Support for six additional languages: Thai, Filipino, Indonesian, Czech, Hungarian, and Portuguese (Portugal)
5. And more…