It took me a bit longer than a week to finish my list of IRWD action items, didn’t it? Hopefully no one was holding their breath. In this second part I’ll be expanding on the first part of the action items list with two sections, one on Design improvements for ecommerce stores and the other on Customer Communication, which is less of a technical category, but one I think is worth covering.
I have finally finished my Magento SMTP, Gmail and Google Apps Email combined extension. It will be available on Magento Connect shortly (as soon as Varien fix the little bugs in the ‘submit extension’ interface – namely version and stability appear to be required and missing from the form.
I won’t bore you with the details again – but I have tested this working on version 1.4 of Magento (along with 1.2 and 1.3 as always). So for those of you having trouble with email on Magento 1.4 – give this alpha release of my SMTP, Gmail and Google Apps email Magento extension a go. Please note it is a development release, and you should definitely not install it on a production site without first testing it in your development environment.
With this extension you can:
- Use Magento with your choice of SMTP server, port and authentication/encryption schemes
- Use Magento with Gmail or Google Apps Email very easily
Please download it and test it out, let me know any feedback you may have.
Update: Thanks to Paulius there is a specially packaged version of the extension that will make it easy to install manually until I can get the Magento Connect version updated (which is still failing). Get it here!
Well, I’m back in New Zealand now and all thawed out after the Internet Retailer Web Design conference – it was a well oiled machine again this year interesting speakers and many great ideas flowing. For World Wide Access it is a chance to set some high level goals for web development over the next 12 months.
In this post, more for myself than anyone, I’m going to set out 15 high level action items that I took away from the conference. This distills the key design and development points I noted over the 3 days of speakers and workshops. During the course of the year I’ll keep you updated with progress on these items and any benefits or issues that arise.
I’ll get straight into it, because we have a lot to cover in 3 broad areas; functionality, design and communication.
Continue Reading…
Seriously, just don’t do it – I think I’m going to have to find a new start page…
It’d actually be a really interesting experiment if the Herald just ran Google adwords instead. I wonder if more people would click on ads that related to what they were reading rather than shitty bandwidth consuming banner ads. There might be something in it, seeing as Google only gets paid when people click on targeted ads and by all accounts they’re doing pretty well out of it….
As a Magento developer I’m always a little bewildered by the number of web stores that use flash banners instead of simple javascript powered rotating div ‘s – at least the div ‘s can have text and alt tags associated, which the search engines can crawl.
</rant>
Tonight I released my new wordpress theme – what do you think? It’s the bastard offspring of two free themes; SevenFive and Agregado hacked together to make a new theme. In the spirit of the original themes being free, here it is – I make no apologies for the crude hacking together and all original copyrights hold – I’m not trying to pass this off as my own or anything.
I’d really like any feedback you have, particularly the 10% of you who use Internet explorer, as I want to make sure the site is simple, clean and usable. So leave a comment, or email me with the things you’d like me to change.
Also, now that I have got the pseudo-creative bug out of my system, I’ll try to post a few more Magento articles to keep you going – so keep an eye out for them.
Hi! I'm Ashley Schroder, a