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Being a computer programmer typically means all of your friends and family immediately assume you a) can fix their wireless router and b) want to. For the same reason we often get asked to help make a website, blog, webstore, killer web 2.0 app or all of the above – which in the most part I can’t help with through lack of spare time. But I did manage to fit a Wordpress + WP-E-Commerce project in, and this is a case study of that development project in particular, comparing WP-E-Commerce to Magento.

My girlfriend Cindy asked me to help with her latest venture, Cheap Titles – so naturally I helped whip up a site. Despite spending most of my time developing Magento, I actually thought I’d give the Wordpress + WP-E-Commerce combo a try. I’ll summarize my rationale for that in the next section – suffice to say it made some things a lot easier.

So this is a little blog post that summarizes my experiences making the site with WP-E-Commerce, what I noticed different about the platform, as compared to Magento – and in particular how I found the underlying code quality of WP-E-Commerce measured against Magento.

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I just uploaded Tweet Beeper to Google App Engine. It’s a simple application that receives an email, and then converts the subject line into a twitter direct message (which in turn can be an SMS sent to the recipients phone). A little whimsical, I know, but the weather was fairly average here this weekend!

TweetBeeper in 1 Minute

How do I use it? Easy!

1. Follow @TweetBeeper on Twitter.
2. Send a subject-line email to:
   your-twitter-id [at] tweetbeeper.appspotmail.com

What can it do?

1. Cron Job Output to Direct Messages
2. Webstore monitor failures to SMS
3. Magento Sale notification emails (or any store)
4. … and any other situations where email to SMS would be handy

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This is a blog post about Magento backups, how you can do them by default in Magento and how a new extension I have made called Cloud Backup will help to make them automatically and send them offsite to Amazon’s S3 storage service – increasing the chance you’ll have a recent backup if (when) bad things happen to your store or server. I’d like your help beta testing this new extension, and this post will hopefully convince you why that’s mutually beneficial for us. The extension is still pending on Magento Connect so give it a whirl, I’ll update this post with the link shortly, or for those that are particularly keen to test it, you can download the release directly and install it manually.
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At the recent Auckland Magento Meetup I had the privilege of seeing Mark Hammersley’s presentation on email marketing – Mark’s a fascinating guy and a real expert, I highly recommend checking out his site. One of the things that came up during his presentation was the idea of first touch tracking your visits, particularly in the sense that if they first come to you because of an email, and you build a relationship with them and they eventually buy from you – knowing if it was an email and which one brought them to the store in the first place is very valuable information.

Magento does not track this out of the box and neither does Google Analytics, however with a simple customization it can be added to the store. This blog post will run through how I added it to two of our new World Wide Access stores, <plug> Cariboo Cribs – which sells cribs and cots to the UK and soon to the USA – and Dominion New Zealand – which sells high quality sheepskin coats and boots (think New Zealand made Ugg).</plug>

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This is a just a quickie – got caught out with a weird issue yesterday where the Magento products in a particular category just disappeared – they still existed if you navigated directly to their URL, but they would not show in their categories (though the Manage Categories screen in the Magento admin still showed those products in their correct category).

These things always happen at inopportune times, I was right about to start a pre-go-live review of a site, and was left with one category completely devoid of products, thanks for making me look like an egg, Magento!
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