Magento – The New Standard in Open Source eCommerce

ECommerce Platform for Growth

Magento has only been around about 6 months now, but in that short time has vaulted to become the preferred choice for ecommerce development for many web designers working with Open Source solutions. What is the reason for this vast popularity and is it justified? The biggest factor is a combination of design improvements with an administration panel that includes everything you need to manage any kind of ecommerce site. Magento has the professional, Web 2.0 look many designers love, and it sets itself apart immediately from OScommerce, Zen Cart, and the other existing ecommerce systems with well laid out templates and easy set up of site sections for your catalog display. Magento offers a shopping cart with a large number of payment gateways integrated out of the box, product comparisons, tags, polls, internationalization support, advanced reports, analytics, and SEO optimized URLs. There is support for coupons, discount codes, catalog management, wishlists, cross-sells, and related items. You can create orders from the admin section for offline or call center sales, and managing shipping is easy with built in calculation for USPS, UPS, DHL, Fed Ex, and other delivery services. Magento will also automatically calculate sales tax on orders and supports multiple currencies on the same site.

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Acquia Gets Ready for Release of Carbon – Commercially Supported Drupal

Acquia - Value-added software products and services for the Drupal

One project that is generating a lot of buzz throughout the Drupal development community is the upcoming release of “Carbon”. Carbon is the first “commercially supported” release of Drupal from Acquia, a start-up company launched by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert. According to the Acquia website, “The Carbon distribution will include the Drupal 6 core release and essential extension modules for rapidly assembling compelling social publishing sites and applications.” The main goal of Carbon will be to provide a professional support network for Drupal to further its penetration into the corporate environment. But what new features will it include, how will it be priced, and what effect will it have on the Open Source development community? These questions remain unanswered though Carbon is slated for release, possibly within the month.

Drupal & Corporate Web Development:

Drupal already has a strong presence in corporate website development, particularly is the music industry. The list of top clients using Drupal for their websites includes:

• SonyBMG
• Warner Brothers Records
• New York Observer
• Forbes
• The Onion
• Harvard University
• Amnesty International

Boris Mann, who works with Bryght and Raincity Studios providing Drupal web design and dedicated hosting solutions, makes the point that this success has come even as no businesses are currently marketing Drupal to top level corporations. He writes, “Acquia, with its funding, business model, and approach, will be/is focused on delivering to the Global Fortune 1000 / Fortune 10000 enterprise customer … most of whom have never heard of Drupal at the CxO level.” Acquia will be offering certifications to developers who want to offer industry standards or benchmarks to their clients as a proof their skills in order to attract a higher salary. In addition to this, they will be providing full technical support for the CMS to clients who purchase the Carbon license.

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