Category: Magento

  • More on the new store

    The new Magento based store is now fully working (except for the PayPal account, of course) and we will have enough fine art prints available in the new range of sizes to open the store on the 8th March  2009.

    Getting the store (B.T.W. which term do people prefer: store or shop?)  up and running was relatively straightforward but far from simple. The documentation is not the most comprehensive I have seen but in its favour it has an active forum where you are very likely to find a solution to most any common problems and the software is pretty much “feature complete” “right-out-of-the-box”.  So for basic use it is simply a matter of choosing a theme and away you go! That is assuming you are running it on your own server. If, like us, you are running on a shared host you need a provider who is either very understanding, like ours, or one that is optimised for Magento. It is rather demanding of the server. We think we have ours configured for our use.

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  • New Fine Art Shop – Zen to Magento

    Some of you will have noticed we have been operating a Fine Art Print Store for a little while.  Our current version is based on the Open Source, osCommerce spin off, Zen-Cart.This is a mature and sophisticated platform and offers a method of integrating with Gallery 2, which we use for our Client Galleries. The shop, in fact, grew almost as a side effect of using Zen as the eCommerce part of our galleries. The integration module eventually proved to cause more problems than it cured and Gallery’s own Checkout plug in (extended by:  Alec Myers) had improved to the point of doing everything we needed for the gallery. So we severed the link between Zen and Gallery each now working entirely independently of each other.

    Zen-Cart has grown over many years and is now (V1.38) rather unwieldy and often counterintuitive both for users and administrators. With the promise/threat of a brand new version I started to look at the possibility of improving the user experience making the shop easier and more fun to use. The new version 2 of Zen Cart has some impressive features but it is seriously behind schedule and would likely require a complete fresh start in customizing it.

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