Tag Archives: Magento

The Retail Associate Platform tablet app

Recently I moved office to the same building as some of the Magento Retail Commerce (MRC) team. I have been learning more about the Magento Point-of-Service (MPOS) application (formerly known as the Retail Associate Platform, RAP) recently and thought it would be interesting to share. Disclaimer: This is my understanding from a few conversations – some of the […]

Cluster Control with Etcd and Docker

Adding and removing hosts for live multi-server sites is a lot easier with technology such as Docker and etcd. Docker containers make it easy to create a template for a new server that you want to spin up, such as a new web server, but you have to connect all the servers together by configuration files when you […]

Docker, Distributed Systems, and Why it Matters to Magento (Part 2)

In Part 1 I talked about the reasons behind why I believe a Docker based distributed Magento installation makes sense. In this post I continue with how it could work and some of the problems to overcome. Hosting Provider Images Getting onto a hosted solution, it is easy to get an Ubuntu or similar distribution […]

Docker, Distributed Systems, and Why it Matters to Magento (Part 1)

Docker is a really interesting technology for scaling Magento installations. Docker is standardizing the way to ship application functionality. It goes further than having an installer and setting up a machine with an operating system, the application, and all the configuration settings by providing a way to package all that configuration into a single “container” […]

Magento for Charities – Virtual Products

In a previous post (Charity Site Design Considerations) I described a few patterns I had seen for charity or not-for-profit sites. My favorite sites listed specific items that supporters could choose to fund. I was curious to see how Magento could be used to support such sites, so this is the first of a few […]

Charity Site Design Considerations

In this post I describe aspects I like and dislike about different charity / not-for-profit web sites.  In follow up posts I will describe how Magento can be used to support such functionality. Apart from my normal disclaimer about working for eBay and Magento and PayPal are a part of eBay, I wanted to add […]

Technologies for Nonprofits

I am going to write up a few posts on ways in which Magento (an open source web store written in PHP) can be used as a site to support a not-for-profit site – such as a school in a developing country. I will base these posts on the free Magento Community Edition. This series […]

Support a Charity with your Magento Store

So you have a Magento web store that you use to sell goods, but you would like to also support a charity or other not-for-profit?  Why not allow you customers to donate to the cause from your web store? When selecting a cause or causes to support, think about whether the demographics for your store […]

HTTP Request Processing in Magento

I was trying to understand how all the various Magento internal developer concepts fit together, from the perspective of responding to a HTTP request to the web server.  I wrote this up to make sure I understood the concepts. Let me know if I got anything wrong! I am sharing in case useful to anyone […]

The Layers of Magento Site Design

In my work before eBay, when we designed a public web site it was all about menu structures, navigation flows, moving on to wire frames, design look-and-feel, and in our case design the information model behind the site (as we built sites driven from our text database product). In reading up on Magento recently one […]