Throughout this series we’ve skirted around one important issue. Namely, the opaque nature of PHP’s phar format.

Many groups claim the term “open source” in someway or another. There’s open source the license, which dictates how and where code can be used and shared. Then there’s open source “you can you see and read the literal source code”, which may or may not have an open-source license. Many (of the better) commercial Magento extensions fall into the later category: They’re distributed as plain text files, but the extension vendor still asserts copyright over the files.

While the n98-magerun is open source both in their licensing and their literal source code, PHP’s phar format muddies the waters …

Big Data is one of the most over-used and over-hyped terms these days, and it’s getting to a point where people seem to replace “data” with “Big Data” altogether. With so much hype and interest in Big Data, it’s hard to ignore it. And yet, when we speak to small-to-mid-sized online retailers, they struggle to understand what Big Data is and whether it can really help a business that isn’t quite so big.

There are two popular definitions of Big Data:

Gartner defines Big Data as, “High volume, high velocity, and/or high variety information assets that require new forms of processing to enable enhanced decision making, insight discovery and process optimization.”

Forrester on the …

Based on interviews with five Magento merchants who migrated from other eCommerce solutions, Forrester Consulting created a composite merchant with $40m in annual online sales and analyzed the main costs, revenue lift, and ROI attributable to the Magento platform.

The study concludes, “Overall, we found that Magento Enterprise Edition provided the interviewed merchants with a stable, scalable, flexible platform that contributed to their incremental online revenue growth.”

Total Economic Impact

“Magento Enterprise Edition Enables A Scalable eCommerce Platform That Drives Businesses’
Growth”

For a hypothetical composite merchant with $40 million in online sales that operates both brick-and-mortar stores as well as its eCommerce website, the study found that with the Magento Enterprise Edition Commerce platform the composite …

Tuesday Night: Capacity-Crowd Party

IRCE 2013 kicked-off Tuesday night in Chicago, and Magento helped everyone celebrate by hosting an incredible party. More than 800 people joined the Magento team at Public House, Chicago’s most-famous gastropub, for a great evening of networking and fun. Buzz about the Magento party spread quickly, and there was soon a line around the block to get inside.

A big “Thank You” to all of the merchants, Magento partners, developers and friends for joining us on Tuesday.

Wednesday: Magento Buzz Throughout the Expo Hall

Wednesday was an incredible day at IRCE for the Magento team. Everywhere you looked inside the vast …

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AddThis service allows you to add to your website a great number of bookmarks and major social services buttons, so that customers could share a link with you via any social network. The script is installed in steps: Registeron the AddThis service.  This step is required to make the service count the button usage statistics. [...]

Welcome to The New Age: Making The Most of Google’s Paid Shopping Feed

Traffic from Google Shopping has been a major source of traffic for the eCommerce industry for over 10 years now. While it’s gone by different names like Google Base and requirements have evolved over the years, the basics remained the same: submit accurate data, with product inventory, pricing, and links to images, and the world’s largest search engine would send traffic your way.

This all changed in Q3 2012, sending shockwaves and panic through the industry as merchants attempted to grapple with the change amid a busy holiday season. Amazingly, despite all of the advance notice and forum buzz, many merchants were …

Changing Router Object Order via local.xml:

Clever bit of configuration from Ben Marks to sneak the CMS Router in before the Admin and Standard router.

Allow users to upload images for your products and in that way be a significant part of your store life with Customer Images Uploader. This feature will make the content of your site dynamic and unique, and the customers will be happy and loyal due to the impressive level of their involvement. Any uploaded picture [...]

I recently transferred a Magento website from one webhost to another. Frontend part is working fine. I am able to view products and cms pages. I am also able to view the admin login page. However, when try logging to admin, I get error page showing the following SQL query: