Magento News Weekly 026: Mage Titans at Austin TX, Install Magento 2.X On Debian Server, Improve Customer Retention With Magento ...

Zain Imran
August 26, 2016

Top of the weekend, Magenticians!

Here we are with your weekly Magento goodies that you will simply love to read. Not only does it help you bolster your knowledge of your industry, but it also jacks up your technical as well as strategic skills to help improve the performance of your online commerce business.

It seems that lately, a lot of Magenticians put on their thinking hat and penned down several awesome posts. Here we go.

One of the major reasons for the success of Magento is that the community’s feedback is accorded great importance. Being a stakeholder in the Magento ecosystem, your experience is vital to shaping the future of the product. So, Elena Leonova is conducting an official Magento survey to ascertain how to improve the customer section of the Magento admin panel. Help out the Magento team by filling out the survey here.

Using Full Page Cache (FPC) can significantly boost your eStore. So, Max Chadwick’s brilliant article, 5 Enterprise_PageCache Pro Tips, is a must read! He delves into the code to explain why FPC request responses don’t get saved under an expiry. Similarly, he examines the code to explain why cache becomes invalidated when it exceeds cache size, why uncached containers should be avoided, why caching fails when a request has more query parameters than the max depth, and how, for the same URL, there are separate FPC entries for each customer segmentation. All of this useful info is just a part of the comprehensive talk Max delivered at NomadMage. He provides a link to his presentation slides as well :)

In the current age, you can’t afford to sit idly by, thinking that the site design you once approved and implemented is going to give you optimum results for each and every visitor of your website. A/B testing the aesthetics of your online store is a recommended practice to figure out what works better. You must do customer segmentation, and optimize the site appearance to maximize the chances of conversion. But hold up, are you going to create a separate handle in the code for each and every new subcategory of visitor you assign? There is a better way. It’s called Custom Layout Handle. Adrian Szulc has written a gem of a tutorial, How to Change the Layout of Just One Category Using Observer. The article shows how to specify main category ID, how to create helpers who will return categories, and how to create observer.

Attention Magento 2 developers! Oleg Semenov has composed a blog post about module development, Custom Variables, and Filters in Static Blocks in Magento 2. The files he deals with in this article are block.php, etc/module.xml, helper/data.php, and model/template/filter.php. It’s a short and sweet post, don’t miss out.

Taking a brief break from the technical articles here is something about the business side of Magento. Andrew Stokes elaborates on How to Improve Customer Retention With Magento 2. The focus is on the segmentation tool, promotional rules, gift cards, and reward scheme. Andrew shows you exactly how to implement these customer retention tactics.

Mage Titans is a Magento community event taking place in Austin, TX on September 8th and 9th, 2016. If you are a part of the Magento ecosystem in any capacity, you should attend. I wrote a blog post on the benefits to you of being there. Mage Titans Is Happening at Austin Texas This September and You Better Be There!

In How To Install Magento 2.X On Debian Server, Fayyaz Khattak goes into detail about how Magento operates in a Linux environment. He justifies his assertion that Magento 2 should be deployed on the cloud. Then, he shares how to install MySQL database, granting account privileges, extracting Magento after downloading, assigning ownership, front-end set up and tweaking.

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Something which may not seem too complicated actually turns out to be exactly so. Adding a modal window with custom fields to an already existing form is an example of such an instance. It’s not as easy as it sounds, and you need proper guidance to achieve this. So, read Sergey Uchuhlebov’s post, How to Create a Modal Window in a Custom Field With a Code in Magento 2.

Finally, a lot is written about the conferences which are going to be held or have already been held. But, what if you want to know how to host a Magento conference? Nandino Loncar answers that question in Organizing a conference? Here are practical tips that will help.

Phew! I suggest you read the posts which sound most useful to your role in the Magento community. And forward the other posts to your colleagues and friends – be a knowledge propagator!

Have a wonderful weekend, and a wonderful weekday ahead. We’ll see ya next Friday. Cheers! :)