I watched the webcast that announced the release. There are some interesting new features, which I’ll summarise in this article.

Gift registry

There is a gift registry in the latest release that allows shoppers to create gift lists (a bit like wishlists) and then distribute them to their contacts. As items are bought from the list, they are removed from it, and they are all allocated the same shipping address, so they can be shipped to the owner of the list. This looks like great functionality for weddings and such like. We’ll be evaluating it properly soon, as some of our clients will definitely be interested in it.

Recurring purchases

Using Paypal, customers can now set up recurring purchases of items they want delivering every month, for example. We have a client who wants to offer a monthly delivery of one of their products to customers throughout the year, and this is perfect for them. The fact that it’s tied to Paypal may be an issue for some, but once again it’s something that will help many retailers.

Enhanced search

Varien made Solr an option for search in version 1.8 of Enterprise Edition. They’ve enhanced the search in the latest version with the option to have suggestions appear as searches are being typed in, and with auto-correction of mis-spellings in search terms.

Pod1 tends to implement Enterprise Edition with Fact-finder, a merchandisable eCommerce search solution that is comparable to Omniture Merchandising, Fred Hopper or Endeca, so it’s unlikely we’ll be implementing Solr for any of our clients soon, but it’s great that Varien are working with one of the leading open source search solutions, rather than trying to create a solution themselves: search is an often over-looked area of complexity in eCommerce, and it’s a good thing to get specialist help with.

Magento Connect

Magento Connect is now available in Enterprise Edition. Until now, if you wanted to install a Magento extension in Magento Enterprise you had to do it manually, which is a fairly complex task, best left to developers. Site owners can now browse and install extensions that have been developed to work with Magento Enterprise, in the same way they could with the Community Edition. We expect to see lots of development in this space: one example is that we’ll soon launch a version of our Sagepay extension that will be installable in Magento Enterprise using Magento Connect.

Full Page Caching

Varien have enhanced Magento Enterprise Edition’s full page caching so it will work with pages that contain dynamic content: the dynamic content will be generated on demand, while the static content is cached. They expect this enhancement to significantly improve site performance once again.

Payment Bridge and PCI Compliance

The last (and largest) enhancement I’m highlighting is the implementation of the Magento Payment Bridge, which is a step towards achieving PCI compliance for retailers. This is a very complex area. I’ve spoken to Varien about their intentions with the payment bridge, and I’m consulting with other industry experts as well, to formulate a clear position for our clients, but the key points I’ve identified so far are:

• Using Magento Enterprise Edition 1.9 isn’t going to ensure you’re PCI compliant: Magento itself no longer handles payments if you’re using the Payment Bridge, but you still have infrastructure and process work to do to achieve compliance.
• The Payment Bridge encapsulates all the payment functionality for payment systems that Varien have integrated it with, and at present that list is very short: none of the payment systems Pod1′s UK clients use has been integrated yet. Third parties can’t integrate other payment systems with the Payment Bridge.
• Retailers can still use other payment extensions, such as our Sagepay extension, and can still achieve PCI compliance through that route.

I’m preparing a presentation on this subject for our Magento Developers’ Meet-up tomorrow, and I’ll share that through the blog later this week.

Conclusion

Varien have come out with another very interesting and useful upgrade to Enterprise Edition. Some of its features are very useful to our clients, and we’ll be implementing them over the coming months. The PCI situation remains complex, and we’re continuing to provide advice to our clients on an individual basis.

There will be geeks, pizza and beer.

When Wembley Stadium was being built, I remember all sorts of media stories about how badly the project was going, how incompetent the company doing the work must be, and what a disaster it was. Now we have this fantastic stadium, that we’ll be using for decades. Even my recent new kitchen was painful. Often, because of my role, I’m involved in projects when they get painful, and it’s made me wonder once or twice if stress-free projects are really the goal. Of course we can optimise all our processes to make things as smooth and as slick as possible, we can use our experience to avoid issues that are likely to arise along the way. I’m wondering, though, if that’s really the right thing to do, if the goal is to get a project done as quickly, as efficiently and as well as possible? The project will (hopefully) be short, and our enjoyment of its output will (hopefully) be long, and perhaps that’s the main thing?

If this makes sense, perhaps it means those of us who work on projects should have thick skins, and come prepared for adversity, rather than spending too much time making sure everything progresses in a smooth, flawless way.

I’m not suggesting that we should discard good practise and professional delivery at all, only that perhaps we should all be prepared for the tough times, and accepting of them when they come, because it will be worth it in the end.

I also got quite a lot of feedback after that post (my most popular blog post ever, unexpectedly) that I should look at MAMP, an easy to install MySQL / php / Apache application for the Mac, so when Entropy didn’t work, I thought I’d give MAMP a try. Unfortunately, MAMP runs an old version of php, and Magento needs version 5.2, so that was no help. My team tell me I can update MAMP to run a more up to date version of php, but that seems perverse when MAMP is one of those tools everyone describes as ‘easy to use’ and ‘no hassle’. So I continued looking.

Yesterday, I found a solution that works: Zend Community Edition, available from here. I downloaded and installed it, and found it had installed its own copy of Apache (as an alternative to OS X’s), a current version of php, and MySQL, as well as some interesting management tools I haven’t got into yet. I loaded the database into MySQL, set up the hosts file entry described in my original post, and copied the Magento code to Zend’s htdocs folder, then ran the installation, and it worked perfectly.

I’ll write a Zend version of the installation instructions soon, but for anyone else having the same problem, Zend works with Snow Leopard and Magento, and is a viable solution, at least for R&D and demos like those I need to do locally.

Feel free to comment, extend, ask for extra functions and such like.

Install php and MySQL

OS X comes with Apache installed, but you’ll need to install php and MySQL before you can install Magento. I got mine from here and they work perfectly: just download the dmg files and run them. Note that the Entropy php isn’t yet compatible with Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) and the MAMP server isn’t yet at php 5.2: a requirement for the standard Magento installation. For Snow Leopard systems, I’m looking at Zend Server Community Edition, and will update in the next few days.

Install phpMyAdmin

Once you have php, MySQL and Apache all set up, you can install phpMyAdmin by downloading it from here. Installing phpMyAdmin and getting that working proves:
- Apache is working and pointing to the right place
- php is working
- MySQL is working and accessible from Apache / php

Create a host file entry for your local Magento install

Magento hates working on localhost, and the easiest way to work around that is to edit your host file and add a fictitious domain, which will actually be served by your laptop.

Go to the command line and type in ‘sudo nano /etc/hosts’ then type in your password (assuming you’re an administrator on your laptop) and add a line like the following:

127.0.0.1 magento.enterprise.com

Save the file (Ctrl-O) and quit nano (Ctrl-K) and then check you can ping magento.enterprise.com. If you can, you’re ready to install Magento Enterprise. The first step is to install the sample data.

Install sample data

With Magento Enterprise 1.7 you can use the standard sample data that came with Magento Enterprise 1.2, available here. Download the zip file and unzip it, then go to phpMyAdmin, create a database (mine is called magentoenterprise) and import the SQL from the sample data file. It’s important you do this before you install the Magento application itself.

Install the application

I can’t link to a downloader for Magento Enterprise, but this is the point where you will unzip that, and copy it to a subdirectory of your sites folder. Mine is at ~/Sites/mage_ee which (if you’ve used magento.enterprise.com in your host file) will mean Magento is at http://magento.enterprise.com/username/mage_ee after you’ve copied it from the zip file.

You might need to set access on the files after you’ve unzipped them: to do this go to your site’s root directory (~/Sites/mage_ee in my case) and type in ‘sudo chmod -R -v 777 *’ and enter your password when prompted. This is poor security in the real world, but fine for a demo site on a laptop, especially one that’s using a fictitious domain name.

If you type in the URL in a regular browser, you should be taken to the install script, which (if you’ve followed all the steps above) should work perfectly first time.

Critical things to remember:

- The URL is the one you created in your hosts file

- The database name, login and password were all set up in phpMyAdmin

Once you’re finished with the installation, you can copy the images from the sample data zip file to the media folder in your Magento directory, and your sample store will then have all the pretty pictures as well.

I can add more detail in most places in this article, but for most people I hope the sequence of steps is the main thing. If you do this in the wrong order, you’ll have to start again, so follow the sequence carefully.

Email from Graze

The brown boxes are arriving at our office in huge quantities now: Pod1′s going to need a bigger mailbox soon.

Graze's first delivery

I just received my first delivery from graze.com, a service that delivers healthy (and not healthy) snacks to your home or office regularly. The website’s a great experience (lots of control, rating opportunities, personalised product and some lovely Ajax coding), and the product looks good too. This is the sort of smart innovative new service I really like.

To get a free trial go to graze.com and enter the code G9LMPCM.

Later, I went to Cineworld’s website, to look up when the new Terminator film is on. Cineworld’s site displays advertising for other companies, and I was surprised to see an ad for Lakeland, which included the very product I’d been browsing for earlier. The surprise effect was strong.

Lakeland banner driven by Criteo

I realised what had happened was that I’d been served a banner ad by a company called Criteo. Basically, they track what you do on their clients’ websites, and then run ads across the Internet which become very personalised if you’ve looked at a product on a client site. So the fact that I’d looked at a banana bag at Lakeland made me the lucky recipient of an add for said product when I went to Cineworld.

Some people might be uncomfortable with the intrusive aspects of this advertising, but I was impressed that it’s working, and the results would be very interesting to see. Showing people ads that we know are relevant to them has to increase effectiveness, and when the average banner gets a click through less than 1 time in 100, these must surely be star performers.