We’re on a mission to change that for the better by putting the power in your hands.

But wait, we’re not supporting just the Store Owner here — we’re totally rethinking layout management for the Theme Designer and the Module Developer. We’ll also be releasing a kick-ass Magento Theme as default with DIY Mage, showing off all the cool new features we’re implemented.

For more information check out our progress on diymage.com. This is so exciting!

The module allows website users to lookup their full address from a postcode or partial address fragment. This saves time and reduces shopping basket drop offs.

It’s compatible with all version of Magento since version 1.3 and is available to download from Magento Connect

“Meanbee provided an outstanding level of service, and proved themselves to be a highly capable and diligent team.”

Dan, World Addresses

Plundor is offering 6 great Magento extensions at massively reduced prices in their first Magento extension bundle. Get your hands on all 6, valued at $1,272.50, for only $150. That’s an incredible discount of nearly 90%!

We’re privileged enough to be a part of the bundle with our automatic sale module. Use it to quickly create a page at /sale of your Magento site with all products that have a special price set.

It’s only available until the end of Friday this week. So don’t miss out, head over to Plundor to purchase the bundle now.

The Bundle

Automatic Sale Category – Meabee – £ 49.99 ($ 77.50)

Want to provide your users with a nice overview of all items in your shop that are on sale? Use this extention to do so, complete with product filtering and layered navigation.

Better Store Search – Sweettooth – $ 249.-

Manually Specify Weightings and use complete word processing to get more accurate (automated and controlled) search results so your users find what they need.

CheckItOut – Ecomdev – $ 349.-

Get your vistors through that checkout process as quickly as possible! Use this extension to create a short one-step-checkout process with a lot of configuration options.

Knowledge Base – Aheadworks – $ 199.-

Don’t have a FAQ section or need to upgrade it? This section takes care of regular user questions getting information to the customer more quickly and having less customer requests by e-mail. Also a great way to build valuable content for your SEO rankings.

Red Mobile Theme – RedLightBlinking – $ 299.-

How many customers visit your website with their mobile device? Don’t lose sales on those customers and get them their own special theme adapted for mobile devices. Easily customizable with your own logos and colors.

Task Manager – Nimerce – $ 99.-

Do you have multiple employees work in the Magento backend? Get them one central place to create and manage tasks and streamline your shop management flow.

Full bundle details are available at Plundor.

When developing Magento themes, you will quite often have flat HTML that you are breaking apart and putting into Magento’s template files. One thing that I have OCD-like tendencies with is the need to make sure that all text is in an inline translate. By that I mean using:

<?php echo $this->__('Basket') ?>

Obviously, this is good practice to have when building any Magento store! However, it can sometimes mean a lot of repetitive typing, so I decided to use a regular expression instead to replace text automatically. I’ve tended to use textmate during development and so have used the following for “Find and Replace”, but they can easily be converted to be used in your text editor or IDE of choice.

Find this:

([^-])>([^<\s][^<]*)<

Replace with:

$1><?php echo $this->__("$2") ?><

This snippet will work even if the file already includes some inline translates. I've tested it a bit, but if anyone finds some edge cases where it doesn't work, then let me know.

For "$2" I'd normally use single quotes, but the current regex won't look for and escape the string if it already contains a quote, e.g. an apostrophe. So I've left it as double quotes as these are less likely to appear in strings.

Note this regex won't replace attributes e.g. alt and title tags. Just the content within elements.

October 2011′s eCommerce survey found 4% more stores than the June survey, detecting 26,594 in total. The analysis looks at the home page of the top 1 million Alexa sites and analyses them for identifying features of 32 different eCommerce packages.

Both Zen Cart and Magento see huge growths of 18% each this month. However, Magento is the real winner with over 20% of the eCommerce sites found being attributed to the platform. We’ve consistently seen growth from Magento over the last 12 months and it shows no sign of slowing.

Meanwhile, osCommerce remains the 4th most popular platform but the downward trend continues with 200 less sites compared June’s survey.

There are a number of other eCommerce platforms that have seen steady growth over the last 12 months, including Interspire, OpenCart, PrestaShop and Uber-cart.

The presence of Enterprise edition of Magento has increased from 274 to 378 sites, up by over a third! As a biased Magento Developer, it is very encouraging to see more and more corporate companies moving to the platform.

As an aside, the hosting location of each site was checked. Of the twenty-six thousand sites, over ten thousand were hosted in the United States. The second largest identifiable hosting country was Germany with just under two thousand sites.

Most Popular eCommerce Software (Top 1M Sites) – October 2011

This month, I decided to also look at just the top 100,000 sites to see how the distribution changes. I was expecting software such as IBM WebSphere and GSI commerce to rule the Enterprise market. Magento actually does very well there with 232 stores, and only 45 of which appear to be built upon the Professional/Enterprise edition.

Most Popular eCommerce Software (Top 100K Sites)- October 2011

Full Results

Here are the full results for all 32 eCommerce packages. Historic values are also provided were available.

All of the signatures remained the same this month, but I did fix one bug that had resulted in some false positives. This causing an anomaly which is particularly noticeable with IBM WebSphere, Miva Merchant and ProStores all losing a number of stores in this edition of the survey.

Most Popular eCommerce Sites Comparison over last 12 Months – October 2011

The following graph is limited to the top 18 eCommerce software and depicts number of sites detected over time. It is plotted on the same axes to allow for relative values to be compared.

Thanks

Thank you for those that get in contact to thank me for the survey. It’s nice to hear all of you, but especially from those that have used this series of posts as evidence when discussing eCommerce solutions with clients.

Follow me on twitter as @bobbyshaw

Would you be interested in purchasing a site list?

After discussions with Alexa, I’ve been able to confirm that it’s not against their terms of service to sell lists of sites running particular eCommerce software. So, if you’re interested in getting a full or partial site list. Please .

Play your local mp3 files in the browser with Browser Beats, a hack weekend project by Tomas Gerulaitis and me.

This weekend, Storm Consultancy held their second hack weekend. A time for webbies to descend on “Storm Towers” to code, design, drink, eat pizza and play Guitar Hero. I paired up with Tomas to build a browser music player (only compatible with Chrome), that plays local MP3 files using the HTML 5 audio element.

Twitter Bootstrap, a handy template for budding web apps, was released on Friday, so we decided it would be pretty cool to make use of that. While we didn’t need many of its features, we made use of the grid system and the modal box.

Functionality-wise, Browser Beats allows you to add local files to your “Library”, then click to add them to the now playing queue. There are then basic controls at the bottom of the page to move between tracks on your playlist.

We used a JavaScript ID3 library available on GitHub to get the tags of tracks to populate the library. For the custom audio controls, we had help from Terrill Thompson.

Obviously, it’s very limited in functionality. Major omissions at the moment include a method of saving your library so that it’s retained after page reload. However, all in all, a fun weekend’s work.

Thanks to Storm for putting on the event!

One of the things we loved about this project was the high quality photos of bedroom furniture which really sell the products.