We are happy to announce a couple of major releases today. Users of the Australia extension will be pleased to hear that we have released version 3.0, containing substantial new features and many minor enhancements. Additionally, the new Feeds Generator extension has been launched, allowing you to easily produce feeds of your Magento catalogue for the major shopping comparison services like Google Shopping.
Australia The 3.0 release of the Australia extension is a major release that adds many new features for Australian stores.
Algolia is an exciting new hosted search service that provides instant search results as you type. The service is reliable, with a 99.99% uptime SLA and a distributed service network that delivers lightning fast results no matter where you are in the world. It provides an easy to use administration interface which allows you to quickly and easily check on the data and settings of your search indexes, as well as viewing analytics and logs.
As part of our ongoing work on Mercator (a Magento Community Edition distribution launched last year), we have released a demo Vagrant box, available for immediate download. Mercator has recently been updated to merge changes from the Magento CE 1.9.0.1 release, and now includes features such as a streamlined checkout, responsive design using the Bootstrap framework, and improved search functionality. Rather than having to set up a development environment and install Mercator, the box is fully configured and ready for use.
Fontis is pleased to announce the release of Mercator, a community driven distribution of Magento. The Magento community has matured to the point where an amazing number of valuable open source contributions have been released, and Mercator expands upon the Community Edition feature set by bringing together the best of these extensions into a cohesive distribution. Code is now on GitHub, and already includes a number of additional features in its initial commit that have been integrated through community extensions.
Blogs are a great tool for businesses to engage with customers and publicise the latest products, promotions and services through their website, and eCommerce websites are of course no exception. There are a number of solutions for Magento that have been around for quite a long time now, but we feel there's still room for improvement when it comes to a native extension, and that's why we're pleased to announce the release of the Fontis Blog extension for Magento.
We have just released an important update to the Fontis Westpac extension, which should be installed by all merchants using the PayWay service. The update includes a new Verisign certificate for the PayWay gateway which will be required in order to continue connecting to the gateway. Merchants who will be affected by this update should have already been contacted by Westpac.
In addition, we have added another small but often requested feature, and added in a credit card type selection box to the PayWay and QuickGateway settings pages in the Magento configuration.
A successful Magento implementation requires not only development expertise and an understanding of its internals and various settings, but also systems administration knowledge to ensure that the hosting environment is configured correctly and for optimal performance. As a store owner or developer who may not be familiar with all of these areas themselves, it can therefore be difficult to check on the overall quality of a particular installation. How can the relative “health” of a Magento store be quickly and easily assessed?
With its most recent update (version 1.2.10.1), our Magento-MYOB synchronisation application M2M Sync now supports Magento Go. This hosted Magento solution allows businesses to set up online stores without needing to manage their own server and implementation, and offers an enhanced set of features compared to Magento Community Edition. M2M Sync has been updated to handle these additional features, such as gift card accounts and store credit, and is an ideal solution for MYOB users who are tired of error-prone manual data entry.
Our congratulations to everyone at Big Brown Box, who were the winners of the inaugural Best Site Design award last week at the Online Retailer Industry Awards 2010. The awards were extremely competitive and drawn from over 170 nominated online businesses around Australia; the Best Site Design category in particular boasted some of the most innovative online retailers in the Australian market.
The Big Brown Box website and the key reasons for its win were described by the ORIA judging panel:
In addition to the feed generators, there are some incremental improvements to the rest of the extension, most notably in the BPAY and direct deposit functionality, which now have their own order statuses to help administrators determine at a glance which payment method was used to place an order.
We hope these changes will continue to provide Australian online retailers with commonly desired functionality for running a Magento website in Australia.