Magento has two bits of important updates on their site for this week. SimpleHelix customers who are also Magento users might find this information important and useful.
First – The Magento Users Guide is now available in a print edition. They’re using Lulu as a print service to distribute the paper copies. The cost is currently $32.95.
Second – Magento Connect is listing new extensions for use in the storefront. There’s an event calendar and MailChip synchronization as well as a few others that Magento users may need.
Since SimpleHelix focuses predominantly on e-commerce hosting, we can’t help but pass on the links too useful e-commerce themes to our readers. Magento, being such a popular open-source platform, is the platform most often skinned. Today is no different as we have another link to share with you that offers “30 High Quality Magento Templates To Spice Up Your E-commerce Projects”.
Compare with other ecommerce solutions such as osCommerce, Magento has fewer free plugins and templates. But we had try our best to collect best free/premium templates for Magento. Hopefully there will be more and more free templates coming out. Please leave a comment here if you found any quality template that we missed out.
There link starts by listing out the FREE! available templates but also includes some premium options as well. We definitely encourage you to check it out!
There is a Magento User’s Guide available in PDF format from the Magento website. We’ve heard basic chatter indicating that this is a good resource for the average Magento user, but we’re wondering how much more it offers than other resources. For example, the Magento Wiki seems like a solid resource in and of itself.
The Magento User Guide provides the site administrator with detailed instructions addressing the platform’s innumerable functions. From setting up your store to managing your products, pages and promotions to generating detailed reports, our User Guide empowers our ever-widening customer to utilize the platform for all of its vast capacity. Serving as a handy problem solving solution as well as a practical step by step guide, our User Guide is sure to become a cost-effective partner in your Magento store implementation.
Maybe part the appeal is being able to print it up and have it read like a basic manual, easy to navigate and write on. We’re curious…does anyone have an opinion of the printing? Is it irreplaceable as a tool or just something ancillary to the support found on the web?
We’ve written before about the upcoming MageBridge – an integration of Joomla! and Magento. Yireo, the company behind MageBridge, has finally launched a demo of this integration for interested parties to see live. The even offer an administrative login so you can create customer accounts. If this is something you’ve been keeping an eye on, seeing the potential power of a fully integrated CMS like Joomla! with Magento, then you should definitely check it out. And let us know what you think!
As with any open source platform, Magento users tend to make extensions for the platform to fit their needs. This is a positive situation for that particular user as well as others out there who may find themselves facing the same challenges. Many of these extensions can be found listed on the Magento website its. (See full list here.)
There are extensions that work with Amazon as well as extensions that support other languages. (German language pack here.) Explore the categories to see if anything suites your needs. And keep in mind, the list features more than just extensions to the power/productivity of Magento. There are also Design Packages which feature themes that can be edited to suit a store’s needs.
Periodically we like to focus on the wonderful aesthetics accomplished within the framework of Magento. There are some amazing Magento themes being used and here is a recently entry spotlighting some amazing examples of what can be done.
I’ve been searching the web for truly inspiring Magento Templates and only several designs impressed me so much that I decided to share them with you.
Note all Magento Templates shown below are developed by different template providers, among them TemplateMonster, Algozone, Ecommerce-Themes, SilverThemes and Templates-Master. Each Magento Template is designed with a certain business in mind. However these templates can be easily edited to meet your requirements.
Then entry lists many examples but one that caught our eye was one geared to a music store at eCommerce-Themes. Take a look at the full list yourself and see if you find anything that suits your needs.
July 17th, 2009
Posted in Resources
Tags:Extensions, Magento, users guide 
(0) Comments
Share This
