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.

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.

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!

The June 2011 eCommerce survey of the Alexa top 1 million sites found 25,592 online stores. Magento continues to reign as the most popular platform with 4,705 sites, an 15% increase since February.

Zen Cart sees the largest gains, doubling to 3,167 sites. This results in Zen Cart becoming the second most popular eCommerce software in the top 1 million sites. This increase is predominantly due to improvements in the signatures used to detect technologies. These also led to 800 more web sites running IBM WebSphere being identified. While these two pieces of software were the most heavily affected by adjustments to the survey, improvements were made across the board.

Of all software analysed, osCommerce saw the largest loss; falling from 3,033 sites in February to 2,554 responding in this edition.

Most Popular eCommerce Software – June 2011

From a Magento developer’s point of view, of the 4,705 Magento sites found, 274 included indications that they were running on the Magento Enterprise edition. This month, checks were added for Magento Go, Magento’s new hosted solution. This is aimed at small and emerging retailers and therefore we would not expect many to appear in the top 1 million. Indeed, only 8 stores were found using Magento Go. The most popular of these was fkc.com, ranked around 155K busiest site. However, this store is still under construction. On the other hand, chefstore.mx is open for business but only ranked around the 800K mark.

In addition to Magento Go, a number of other eCommerce software packages were added to this survey:

• ATG
• ProStores
• CS-Cart
• CubeCart
• ECShop
• Shopp
• Yahoo Stores
• LemonStand
• 3DCart

As a short aside, I also repeated the analysis of HTML 5 adoption in the top 1 million. 646 of the 25,592 online stores found were using HTML 5, making eCommerce slightly below the average of 2.67% for the rest of the top 1 million.

Full Results

The full results for all eCommerce software detected are provided in the table below. I’ve included the results from the previous two surveys so that growth and decline can be observed for each. I’d be interested to hear your viewpoints on any of these findings.

Another Pretty Graph!

You know you wanted one. The graph below shows the number of sites detected for each eCommerce platform over 3 editions of the survey. All points are plotted on the same axes so that the popularity for each platform can be more easily compared. From this we can see just how much the leaders, Magento, Zen Cart, VirtueMart and osCommerce, are dominating in terms of sheer number of stores.

Once again, the analysis will be re-conducted in around 3 months, so we’ll see if Magento can retain or perhaps even extend their lead. I’m sure eBay would certainly expect so.

Comments on this survey and suggestions for further enhancements or alternative investigations are very welcome. You can leave a comment, email me via the link below, or get in touch on twitter: @bobbyshaw.

Everyone loves a list of funny computer programming jokes. I found this email in the Computer Science department of the University of Bath.

Date: 15 Jun 1979 2:04pm (Friday)
From: MURPHY (not authenticated) at PARC-MAXC
Subject: Troutman’s Laws of Computer Programming
To: BoogieInterest

1. Any running program is obsolete.
2. Any planned program costs more and takes longer.
3. Any useful program will have to be changed.
4. Any useless program will have to be documented.
5. The size of a program expands to fill all available memory.
6. The value of a program is inversely proportional to the weight of its output.
7. The complexity of a program grows until it exceeds the capability of the maintainers.
8. Information necessitating a change in design is always conveyed to the implementors after the code is written. Corollary: Given a simple choice between one obviously right way and one obviously wrong way, it is often wiser to choose the wrong way, so as to expedite subsequent revision.
9. The more innocuous a modification appears, the more code it will require writing.
10. If a test installation functions perfectly, all subsequent systems will malfunction.
11. Not until a program has been in production for at least six months will the most harmful error be discovered.
12. Interchangeable modules won’t.
13. Any system that relies on computer reliability is unreliable.
14. Any system that relies on human reliability is unreliable.
15. Investment in reliability increases until it exceeds the probable cost of errors, or until someone insists on getting some useful work done.
16. Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
17. There’s always one more bug.

31 years doesn’t seem to change much. Any ideas as to who Troutman might be?

Following on from the February eCommerce survey, I decided to release the top 10 sites for some of the more popular eCommerce software packages.

So here we have:

Hope you find them useful

If there are any sites that you think should be in the top 10, give me a shout, I can double check the results and the survey signatures.

Tweet me @bobbyshaw.

During this month’s eCommerce survey which found Magento as the most popular eCommerce software, I added some one-off signatures to look for use of HTML5 in the Alexa top 1 million sites. In total, I found 36,080 sites that were using features of HTML5.

33,813 sites were using the new doctype. While this may seem like a lot, it is only 3.4% of the top million sites according to Alexa.

<!DOCTYPE html>

14,125 sites were using elements new to HTML5, these can be identified on w3schools.

1,769 were using Remy Sharp’s HTML5 enabling script which can be found hosted on Google Code.

<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="http://html5shim.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

I thought about making this post another one along the lines of “Why you should be using HTML5 now”, but I realised that wasn’t necessary, there are enough of those around already. Hence, I’ve just given you the figures so that you can draw your own conclusions.

Magento extends its lead in this edition of the eCommerce survey. 4,074 of the busiest million sites were running Magento, this figure up 19% since November last year. 208 of these were built on the premium version of the Magento platform, Magento Enterprise.

osCommerce is, again, the 2^nd most used eCommerce software but slipped 3% to 3,033 sites. New to this edition, Virtuemart is found to be the 3^rd most prevalent with 2,683 stores. The top 3 account for over 50% of stores in the survey.

The eCommerce survey takes the top 1 million sites provided by Alexa, the web information company. It analyses the home page of each site by matching against signatures for various eCommerce packages to determine if any are being used. This month, 19,000 eCommerce stores were found.

Additions to the survey are VirtueMart, IBM WebSphere Commerce, WP e-Commerce, Ubercart, Demandware and Foxy Cart. VirtueMart is considered the best eCommerce solution for Joomla!, while UberCart is regarded as the most popular choice for stores built on Drupal. WP e-Commerce is an eCommerce plugin for WordPress with over 850,000 downloads.

Here are the results in full.

Obviously there are limitations with this methodology and the numbers can only be used as an estimate of proliferation of each piece of software. With each run of this analysis I am not only increasing the software that are being checked for, but I am also extending the signature base so that there is a more accurate representation. For example, considerable increases can be seen for PrestaShop and Miva Merchant this month, but this is likely to be largely due to improvements in the signatures.

I’ve now released a list of the top 10 sites for the the most popular eCommerce packages.

I love all things eCommerce and Magento, follow me on twitter:@bobbyshaw