2010 was a great year for the Magento platform.  The Community and Enterprise editions gained momentum and the new Professional Edition was released.

Looking forward to 2011 here is a list of things I’d like to see happen this year.

Community Edition Version 2.0

Understandably this may be a pie-in-the-sky wish since we are currently not yet to a stable  1.5 version release.  Nevertheless it would be nice to have a tested and feature-rich major version of the community edition released this year.  A 2.0 version would hopefully continue to improve on speed and data migration.

More Developer Tools

Working with Magento day in and day out you quickly find out where the bottlenecks and time wasters are in the development cycle.  In general I prefer using the command line instead of a web interface.  One thing I like about the Drupal platform is the Drush module (Drupal Shell) which allows developers to execute commands against Drupal installations via command line.  A Magento command line tool that mirrored administration functions would be very useful.  Alistair Stead’s MageTool is a huge step in the right direction.

I’ve also started using Alan Storm’s Commerce Bug extension.  Per the website, “Commerce Bug is a development and debugging extension for the Magento platform.”  It provides very useful information for pages that you are trying to debug.

Developer Community

One area where Magento has been lacking is a suitable focal point for the community of developers to connect.  The Magento Forum should serve this purpose, but it has been historically under-moderated and several questions end up being ignored or poorly answered.  Also, participation by team members has been all but non-existent in recent years.  Moderators have recently been showing up and getting involved so I hope that this will change in the future.

Stack Overflow is a Q&A site for developers that has an active Magento category.  Nearly all questions posted to the site get a quality answer.  Plus, the site doesn’t require a subscription like similar sites.

Your turn: what improvements would you like to see in the Magento platform for 2011?

What tools are you planning to build yourself?

Image credit: World of Oddy

On December 17, 2010 the US Postal Service let customers know that a change was coming to the domestic shipping services.  These changes went into effect yesterday and caused the USPS shipping calculator in Magento to stop working.

The root cause is that the shipping method name now has a “®” symbol at the end of it.

Following is a fix for the issue that involves a change to core code to get you back up and running. The fix removes the ® symbol in the method name.

This fix was first reported in the Magento Forum here, but I’ve reduced it down to two steps for those that don’t want to read through six pages of forum posts.

In file:  /app/code/core/Mage/Usa/Model/Shipping/Carrier/Usps.php

Step 1: Find the following line of code:

foreach ($xml->Package->Postage as $postage) {

And add the following line immediately after it.

$postage->MailService = str_replace("<sup>®</sup>","",(string)$postage->MailService);

Step 2: In the same file, find the following line of code:

foreach ($xml->Package->Service as $service) { 

And add the following line immediately after it.

$service->SvcDescription = str_replace("<sup>®</sup>","",(string)$service->SvcDescription);

Be sure to clear cache and re-compile if necessary.

Update – First Class Mail

In addition to the changes above, the First Class mail method names need to be updated so they will work.

In  file: /app/code/core/Mage/Usa/etc/config.xml

Find the <usps> area and change the following tags for <allowed_methods> and <methods>.

From:

• First-Class Mail International Large Envelope
• First-Class Mail International Letters
• First-Class Mail International Package
• First-ClassFirst-Class Mail
• First-Class Mail Flat
• First-Class Mail International
• First-Class Mail Letter
• First-Class Mail Parcel

To:

• First-Class Mail International Large Envelope**
• First-Class Mail International Letters**
• First-Class Mail International Package**
• First-Class Mail Package
• First-Class Mail Large Envelope

Some of the old methods don’t seem to be available anymore.   The new names will now display in the admin area control panel  (System > Configuration > Sales > Shipping Methods > USPS )  so your store administrator can activate them.  Unfortunately the asterisks are currently required on the International option.

If you need assistance updating your site, please let us know and we can provide a quote.

This project was a collaboration with Wicked Cool Studios.

What we did:

• Magento  template design integration
• Custom Magento module coding
• xHTML/CSS Coding
• WordPress template coding
• Site Installation
• CMS setup
• Newsletter integration

Visit Praise Tea