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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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Well, I said if I got 100 downloads of my latest Magento extension to set custom starting order numbers I’d make some improvements to it, and sure enough it happened. So here are the improvements. Please note I did not actually do the one improvement I promised I’d do, but I did a bunch of others that I hope make up for my laziness. You can get the updated version on Magento connect or download it directly.

In version 0.3 you can now:

1. Hopefully avoid the Update before Save fiasco
2. Disable the padding on the order number, invoice number etc
3. Disable the prefix so that your numbers are treated in their entirety by the increment logic (and possibly the padding logic)
4. Set a custom increment amount to trick your nosey competitors into thinking you do 1000 orders a day!

If you happen to be reading this JT, I skipped v0.2, but I’ll circle back around for the cron increment functionality you suggested at 300 downloads, promise!

As always please give this extension a try in a dev environment first, it’s still being actively developed and I consider it beta. Despite that I am using it myself on several production stores.

Geez it’s been a long time coming thanks to Invalid package.xml format errors and duplicate maintainers and goodness-knows-what else. You can finally get the latest version of SMTP Pro – 1.3.4 – even though it’s identical to 1.3. (thank Magento Connect…).

For those who want to install the Magento extension manually (and if you are engineering Magento you probably should) – you can get version 1.3.4 of SMTP Pro here.

If you read my last post on the improvements, you’ll know that it has some great new features for sending, and logging email in Magento using either SMTP or Gmail/Google Apps. So please give it a try and let me know what you think.

Every time I launch a new Magento store I have to go and hack the database to change the order, shipment, invoice and credit memo numbers. This just doesn’t seem right, and seeing as I was about to launch two stores (in one week!) I thought it’d be better to make the order increment ID’s custom from within the Magento admin panel. Now what I didn’t realize before I set about doing this was that someone had already made a very good extension to customize order numbers – woops.

So not knowing I could just buy an extension for $60, I went ahead and coded one up on my train ride home Friday afternoon.

This is a blog post about what the extension does (and does not) do and how it’s made. I’m going to release it for free, if you need full order customizing functionality, you should still buy Adjustware’s one, it has some great features.

If you’re just here for the free software, you can get it on Magento Connect, if you’d like to learn more about it and how it’s made, please read on.
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This is a blog post about how I structure my Magento store development, and how that has been made easier thanks to the efforts of Colin Mollenhour and his script modman. Hopefully after reading this, you’re all inspired to go set up a similar project structure, because it gives a repeatable, hopefully less upgrade ruined Magento experience. Certainly if you’re not inspired, I’d like to hear about how you are structuring your projects – the more talk of this, the better the overall quality of Magento stores in the wild, I hope.
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