Tutorial: Adding products and categories to your new Magento website
When friends and family come to me for advice on starting up an e-commerce website of their own, I typically refer them to Magento, which is to date the most polished and full featured e-commerce platform I’ve ever seen. Even better, Magento Community Edition is available to download for free, and professionally designed templates are widely available.
There is, however, one rather sizable snag. While the technical installation of Magento is both easy to follow and well-documented, the basic install then leaves you with a blank home page and no real instructions on where to go next.
That’s what this tutorial is here to help with. By the end of this guide, you’ll have logged in as the administrator of your new Magento website, you’ll have become familiar with Magento’s category system, you’ll have created your first product for display and sale on the site, and you’ll have created a simple product listing layout to allow your customers to peruse what you have for sale.
Microsoft TechEd 2010: Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Tips & Tricks
For the last seminar period of Day Two, 5:00 PM to 6:15 PM, I attended “MS Visual Studio 2010 Tips & Tricks” with presenters Dustin Campbell of Microsoft and Scott Cate of CloudDB.com.
5:00 PM: We kick off and are told not to worry about taking notes – all of the following is available at http://scottcate.com/tricks and answers will be posted to questions asked on the Twitter hashtag #DEV315.
5:04 PM: IntelliSense now filters down class names for “new” declarations in C# (already did in VS 2008 for VB.NET).
Will also filter by the capital letters you type (SR for StringReader) – “camel case”.
5:06 PM: New mode for IntelliSense called suggestion mode (Ctrl-Alt-Space). Won’t have to hit Escape to deselect autocompleted class/variable names. Now your suggestions come up but must be confirmed by pressing Tab before they get filled in. IDE remembers this setting in between loads.
5:08 PM: Windows 7 and VS 2010: Lets you pin classes, projects to start page. Also lets you right-click and remove from list. Had to do this in the registry in VS 2008.
5:10 PM: Startup modes: Can show an empty environment always, show last solution, start pages can be customized.
5:11 PM: Code editor tricks: Can right-click a class name and choose View Call Hierarchy. Not only what this class calls, but what classes call it.
5:13 PM: Shift-F12 shows all of the references in the project to a class property.
Microsoft TechEd 2010: Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 For Web Deployment
4:15 PM: My first choice is Rm 276’s “DPR304: FAIL, Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices”, but twenty minutes before the session starts the entrance to that seminar room is already jammed with traffic. I turn around and instead enter the near-empty Rm 272, “WEB204: Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 for Web Deployment” by Vishal R. Joshi. Less laughs, but probably more applicable to my day-to-day routine.
4:20 PM: Internet access in the conference centre still doesn’t work. It’s been two or three hours now?
4:24 PM: We’re starting early! The presenter abruptly introduces himself while standing in the middle of the room, making us all search around to find him. He’s in the middle of the room.
He asks that we provide examples of what kind of setup we’ve got going, and what challenges we face with them. He picks the first person at random and forces him to speak, but after that people volunteer themselves. It runs the usual gamut of multiserver deployments with complicated XCOPY scripts. I can relate.
4:30 PM: We’re given notice to finish checking our e-mail and get ready to pay attention. Joshi plays Louis Armstrong as a sort of Emmy-wrap-up-your-speech music cue, but for writing e-mail.
4:32 PM: Room is about half full.
4:37 PM: One cup of broccoli has only 43 calories. We’re told that this talk has broccoli in it. This is our fair warning that this is a unsexy topic which Vishal will try to counter by being as cheesy as possible. Thanks!
4:40 PM: An old deployment document of Vishal’s is 52 pages long, and doesn’t even have any code in it. And it uses XCOPY. Ouch.
4:41 PM: The centre of today’s discussion: Replacing XCOPY.
Microsoft TechEd 2010: Developers Are From Mars, Testers Are From Venus
Because I missed the seminar I really wanted to attend in the earlier timeslot, I’ve parked myself right outside of Rm 349 in order to attend “DPR05-INT Developers Are from Mars, Testers Are from Venus”.
2:14 PM: I’m the second person into the room, and seat myself near the back to ensure access to a wall power outlet.
2:15 PM: The presenter of the last seminar in this room, “Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Tips and Tricks” has a line four deep full of people wanting to ask extremely technical questions. He’s looking around in desperation wondering how he can get out of here.
2:17 PM: The crowd up front dissipates. One of the presenters of my seminar asks him how it went. He says, “Fine, just answering question after question… Slides are boring!” I tend to agree, though a seminar doesn’t strike me as the right place to ask how to solve bugs I run into at work. He wishes her to “break a leg!” and leaves in a hurry.
2:20 PM: It’s quiet now, so I continue to work on turning my keynote scribbles into something approaching readable.
2:21 PM: The conference hall’s Internet has been down for more than an hour now. I overhear that supposedly a main trunk is down and it’s actually an issue affecting the entire city.
2:40 PM: The seminar room is half full; maybe testing isn’t a popular topic. We’re told we’ll start in 5 minutes.
Microsoft TechEd 2010 Keynote @ New Orleans, Day One
8:35 AM: I head into Hall F for the the Microsoft TechEd 2010 keynote by (a name previously unknown to me) Bob Muglia, President of Server and Tools Business for Microsoft. A coworker beeps me to let me know the doors have been opened at 8:30 AM, so I walk a long mile guided by dozens of red-shirted Microsoft ushers (enforcers?) to the far right side.
8:40 AM: Almost as soon as I take a seat, the band that’s been quietly setting up on the stage kicks into their first song at full volume and startles everyone. It’s a nine-man band composed of all your expected instruments: Guitar, saxophone, drums, trumpet, chainmail-washboard shirt. I fail to catch the name of the band on any of the screens and also forget the name when it’s mentioned at the presentation’s close by Bob Muglia. Sorry guys.
8:45 AM: The lead singer seems to be wearing a sort of chainmail shirt which he also plays as an instrument (the washboard). How great would this have been back in Ye Olde England? You could be both a minstrel and a knight. Maybe instead of being a great knight or a great minstrel you’d be mediocre at both, but the flexibility would have been enticing.
8:47 AM: The lead singer rather abruptly attempts to get the audience to sing along. We fail miserably but at least have a laugh at ourselves. My section is quickly deemed the lead singer’s favourite due to its higher than average energy level (not me, I’m typing, but Dmitri yells loudly at one point).
Hey everyone, I’m in New Orleans for Microsoft TechEd North America 2010 – so for the next four days and nights, I’ll be doing my best to photograph and blog about what I’ve seen, heard and ate in the deep South.
The conference begins early tomorrow (Monday) morning, so today is a travel day for Microsoft zealots all across North America. My connecting flight in Houston was a 737 loaded to the brim with guys (and a few gals) dressed in not-my-very-best-because-I’m-traveling business casual and chunky laptop bags. I guess Fashion 101 will continue to be one badly needed but missing breakout session topic.
Houston to New Orleans was all of an hour’s flight, after which we collected our bags from the medium-sized and easy to navigate Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. There we collectively encountered our first surprise of the day: Everyone seemed to have assumed that an airport-to-hotel shuttle service was part of the TechEd package, something airport employees deny. This led to long lines at the taxi stand, which my two coworkers and I were savvy enough to bypass by heading to the second terminal and use its stand instead.
Check in at Le Pavillon was a snap (actually as I write this, at 10:19 PM, the hotel still seems pretty quiet) so we headed right back out into the 4 PM heat to walk the twenty minutes to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. And boy, it’s hot in Louisiana. I’ve seen hotter in terms of sheer temperature, but the humidity down here is incredible. It’s like a thin jacket of moisture you put on as soon as you walk out of an air-conditioned building. It’s enough to cause condensation on your camera lens and eyeglasses immediately. It’s kind of shocking.
We’re at the convention centre for a purpose: To get our identification badges before tomorrow’s crush, and to pick up whatever swag Microsoft’s got on offer this year. (Bearing in mind, of course, that the conference’s not insubstantial entrance fee makes calling this stuff swag slightly misleading.)
Swag this year? Let’s see:
A Microsoft TechEd 2010 laptop backpack
A Microsoft TechEd 2010 metal water bottle (this will come in handy and is much appreciated)
A t-shirt with “Windows Embedded” printed on the breast and “Microsoft Business Intelligence” on the back, along with a silhouette of New Orleans – in size medium
A Microsoft TechEd 2010 notepad
A trial CD of Microsoft Forefront Business Ready Security
About forty pieces of glossy advertisements by sponsors of the conference that I automatically placed in the recycling bag in my hotel room
We grab a free pop drink on our way out and head for a closeby restaurant – for all three of us, this will be our first meal of the day. Strangely enough, most of the city seems to be closed down and our first choice and recommendation is a bust. Off, then, to Mulate’s, The Original Cajun Restaurant, selected by virtue of its location directly across the street from the convention centre. I have the fried alligator (better than the grilled alligator, which my coworker orders for comparison) and the hamburger steak lafayette. It’s passable.
Back to the hotel, then, for the night. I pledge to visit the hotel’s rooftop pool and still might, but a shower and bed seem more likely as we’ll need to be up and out the door tomorrow at 7:30 AM. Perhaps I’ll take a quick peek just for the sake of seeing if what the views are like from the top. In other case, this’ll be all from me tonight. Goodnight, and on to Day One tomorrow!
