Magento 1.7 is at release candidate version one with 10 open issues. We should be expecting the full release shortly to tie in with the annual Imagine Conference.

It’s time for a whirlwind overview of some of the new features in Magento 1.7.

Captcha

It integrates Zend_Captcha on most customer related forms, e.g. register, login, forgot password, but (somewhat bizarrely) isn’t included on the contact form this time around.

Redesigned iPhone Theme

Naturally, I went looking for something shiny and I wasn’t disappointed. Magento 1.7 brings a redesigned and rebuilt HTML 5 iPhone theme.

It’s really nice and clean, there are some nifty touches like the flipping of products on the category page to see product review information and the add to cart button. It has a definite iPhone feel with the notification icons and grey hatched background used in a few places.

I did notice that any page that uses the new captcha integration in the iPhone theme breaks currently due to the use of a non-existent helper class. However, this bug has already been reported, fixed and is due for release.

REST API

I’ve not had a chance to play, but this version also comes with a brand new REST API. Yay.

Pricing per Customer Group

It’s now possible to set base prices for each customer group.

VAT Number Validation

Customers can now provide their VAT number when is then validated (frontend and backend orders). The VAT number for the store is now also included in the store information configuration.

Indexes

It is detailed in the release notes that indexers have been refactored. From the admin interface, we do now see an extra column that indicates whether an update is required or not.

Cookie Message

In response to the EU cookie law, Magento have now included the option to display a message to new customers indicating the necessity of cookies on the site and requesting permission to use them.

Manage Currency Symbols

The ability to manage the currency symbols used around the site rather than being restricted to what is defined in the Zend library.

System Backup

The backup functionality sees some major new features in 1.7. First thing to notice is that there are now three backup options: “System Backup”, “Database and Media”, and “Database”. The latter of which we are already familiar with. The “Database and Media” creates a .tgz of database and media files. The “System Backup” functionality creates a .tgz of the entire installation (filesystem) of Magento.

All backups now request a name to be given and also give the option of putting the store in maintenance mode while the backup is carried out.

The fancy new feature on top of all of this is the ability to rollback to any one of these. While everyone should already be doing their own secondary and tertiary offsite backups, this is a handy feature nonetheless. You shouldn’t have a Magento store that isn’t managed using a version control system, so I’d personally be cautious about ever using the rollback of a System Backup, but it’s a nice to have.

Auto-generation of Coupon Codes

Previously, by default in Magento, when creating a shopping cart price rule, and you wanted to specify a coupon you could only specify one. Now, there’s built-in functionality to auto-generate a pool of codes for a particular rule.

And plenty more…

I have only spent a couple of hours dabbling with the latest release. There are even more features, improvements and bug fixes that are being shipped. One extra item that deserves a mention is the new “Cache[sic] on delivery” payment method! Go and check out the full release notes.

What is it?

DAC is a nifty little script which has two primary functions. To:

1. Copy over template/layout files from a theme (usually base/default) to a theme of our choosing; keeping Magento’s intricate folder hierarchy intact.
2. Commit this template file with either an automatically generated message or a custom one.

Cool… But why?

When we develop a theme, we only copy templates into our theme from base/default when we need to make changes. We recognise some developers like to duplicate the entirety of this folder for stability reasons. However, in our experience few have arisen and we feel this yields a cleaner theme.

With this in mind it’s a big time saver. For a typical theme, we might copy over and commit dozens of template files before making our own changes. Not only this, but good development practice dictates we automate these repetitive tasks as much as possible.

We’ve also found that committing a duplicate of the template file is beneficial since we can more easily see what changes have been made when browsing git. This is very easy to forget to do (speaking from personal experience!). Let’s see an example:

Where can I get it?

On GitHub.

Thanks for reading chaps!

Any feedback? Leave a comment below or shoot me an email

The February 2012 eCommerce survey found 33,632 sites in the Alexa Top 1 Million. The survey visits each site and analyses the HTML document against a set of rules that detect the use of any one of 40 different eCommerce platforms.

The most popular platform was Magento, with 6,795 sites, a 20% share of eCommerce stores found. Magento has seen a staggering growth-rate, increasing in popularity by over 21% in the last 4 months alone.

Previously, Zen Cart has done its best to grow at a similar rate but only accumulated 7% more sites since October 2011. With 4,042 sites in total, Zen Cart still retains an honourable 2nd position. Following closely is VirtueMart with 3914 sites, which also sees huge growth this month, in part due to new signatures being written.

While osCommerce has reliably lost sites in previous surveys, it gains a signficant number of sites this month, up to 3,199. This is likely due to improvements in the content rules, but we will wait until the next survey to identify whether it is actually bucking the downward trend.

Turning to the top 100K busiest sites according to Alexa, 1,655 stores were detected. In this section of the survey we are expecting more enterprise-focussed shopping cart solutions.

The results of which show that Magento continues to have the most stores in the top 100K, with 345 stores.

Second and third most popular in this category are the traditional Enterprise products IBM WebSphere and ATG.

Improvements

The eCommerce survey has come a long way since the first survey in September 2010. This month sees the coverage of the survey extend to 40 different platforms in an effort to give as broad a view of the market as possible. This, together with improvements to the survey process itself, has resulted in a 26% increase in eCommerce stores found since the October 2011 survey.

The content matching rules for each platform have been rewritten and incorporated into a more sophisticated signature engine. The survey now runs on Amazon EC2 allowing for more sites to be visited and analysed in parallel, and results in a more scalable system.

While the relative popularity of eCommerce platforms has remained static for the majority of solutions, the re-build has, as one might expect, caused some fluctuations in actual number of sites seen. However, trends are expected to emerge in future editions of the survey. Including some reports on where sites are moving from and to, rather than simply viewing software growth and decay.

Thanks goes to Nick Jones for technical assistance with the re-architecture.

Full Results

The aggregated results for all platforms.

Download Now

A range of site lists are available to purchase and download instantly as an .xls spreadsheet. Choose from the most popular platforms or buy all 33,632 sites for only £250 (~$315) + VAT.

For each site the Alexa site rank and the eCommerce platform are provided. Additionally, a DNS lookup is conducted and provides IP and hosting country when successful.

Limitations

The accuracy of the survey is being improved in each edition with signature rules reviewed and new ones added.

Currently, the survey is limited by source sites to analyse. The Alexa produces their site list based on visits to sites by the Alexa toolbar user community. Plans are being made to include data from Quantcast to try and reduce the bias inevitable in any one dataset.

Only one run-through of the analysis is conducted and so if I site fails to respond or there is a network issue at the time of lookup, there will be no result for that site.

I co-own an eCommerce development company, Meanbee. We specialise in Magento, and hence an argument could be put forward that there is a bias towards Magento in the survey. I would respond that significant effort has been put into writing rules for each and every platform and regular improvements are made to the accuracy of all signatures. Focussing on eCommerce as a company we are interested in observing how the market share of platforms changes over time. This enables us to judge the speed of adoption of new platforms and the rejection of old ones. This way we can be sure that we are knowledgeable about the solutions that are available and offering the most appropriate platform for our clients.

That’s all folks

Thanks for reading. I hope you found the statistics interesting. I’d love to hear any comments or questions.

Say hello on twitter, I’m @bobbyshaw.

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 .