In a new post to the Zend Developer Zone Jayson Maynard reminds you of some of the upcoming webinars from Zend that'll be happening this month. There's four of them in the list:

• Best Practices for Magento Development
• PHP Performance: Principles and Tools
• Zend Server for IBM i in Action
• Simpler Debugging, Better Performance: What's New in Zend Server 5.0

All events are free to attend, so if you're interested, click on the links above to get more information on the session and to sign up.

In case you missed the whole series of posts that Matthew Turland did on the Magento e-Commerce platform, he's summed them all up in a new post to the Blue Parabola blog.

The new kid on the PHP e-commerce block, Magento, has gotten a good amount of attention leading up to and since its initial release. Earlier this year, I was entasked with doing an analysis of its features and thought it might make for an interesting series of blog posts. What you see here is the result. Comments are welcome, thanks in advance for your contribution.

Topics in the series covered the catalog browsing, customer service, shipping and SEO features the popular software has to offer.

Matthew Turland has posted the fourteenth part of his series detailing the features that the popular PHP e-commerce package Magento has to offer to the Blue Parabola blog today. This time the focus is on the site management features.

Features covered include:

• Content Staging and Merging
• Support for Multiple Websites and Stores
• Administration Permission System Roles and Users
• Web Services API
• Fully 100% Customizable Design Using Templates

If the series interests you, you can mind more great parts in the series in this category on the Blue Parabola blog.

New on the Blue Parabola blog today is Matthew Turland's latest article in his in-depth look at the features the Magento e-commerce application offers. This time he focuses on the promotions and tools that it includes for marketing the site you have installed.

The majority of the features listed in this area have already been covered in this series. As such, sections for those features in this post are simply linked to other posts where appropriate.

Topics mentioned include:

• Coupons
• Multi-Tier Pricing
• Customer Group-specific Pricing and Group-specific Tier Pricing
• Search Engine Friendly URLs
• New Items Promotional Tool

See the the full post for the complete list (some of which have been mentioned before).

Matthew Turland is back with episode twelve of his "Magento Feature Analysis" series on the Blue Parabola blog. In this new article he focuses on the Internationalization support the popular e-commerce tool includes.

The list of features includes:

• Multi-Lingual support
• Tax Rate Support
• Localization
• Configurable List of Allowed Countries

You can find more in this series in this section of the BP blog and more about Magento from its website.

Matt Turland has posted his latest part of his in-depth look at Magento to the Blue Parabola blog - a look at the search engine optimization features (this is the eleventh part, you can catch up on other parts here).

This time he's focusing on the built-in search functionality with topics like:

• 100% Search Engine Friendly
• URL Rewrites give full control of URLs
• Auto-generated Site Map for display on site
• Auto-Generated Popular Search Terms Page

Other parts in this great series cover things like the checkout functionality, shipping features, order management and catalog/product browsing features. Check out them all for some more great content on this popular e-commerce platform.

Matthew Turland is back today with the latest article in his in-depth look at the Magento e-commerce platform for the Blue Parabola blog. This time he looks at the checkout features the software has to offer.

Features mentioned include:

• One-Page Checkout
• Shipping to Multiple Addresses in One Order
• Guest Checkout
• Checkout with Account to Use Address Book
• Accept Gift Messages Per Order and Per Item
• Saved Shopping Carts with Configurable Expiration Time

He also points out an issue where dynamic IPs could cause an "empty cart" problem because of a security measure Magento has in place.

Matthew Turland has posted part nine of his in-depth series on the Blue Parabola blog looking at the features the Magento e-commerce platform has to offer. This time the focus is on tools it offers to help with shipping information.

Topics spotlighted include:

• Integrated for Real-Time Shipping Rates
• On-site Order Tracking from Customer Accounts
• Ability to Specify Allowed Destination Countries Per Method
• Free Shipping
• Table Rates for Product Sub-totals and Destination
• Table Rates for Number of Items and Destination

More parts of this series can be found linked from the magento category on the Blue Parabola blog.

Matthew Turland has posted the eighth part of his detailed series looking at the feature set that the Magento e-commerce software has to offer to the Blue Parabola blog. This new post looks at the "payment offering" features.

Features mentioned in this post include:

• Customer Store Credits Feature
• Integrated with Amazon Payments
• Gift Certificates/Cards (Physical and Virtual)
• Integrated with Google Checkout
• Accept Purchase Orders
• Payment Extensions Available through Magento Connect

Check out the full post for more and descriptions of each.

Matthew Turland has posted the latest article in his series on the Magento e-commerce platform. He's been talking an in-depth look at the features of the application and reporting his findings in a series of blog posts. This time he focuses on the order management features.

He lists out the seven main parts of this feature, describing each (with links to the Magento manual for some):

• View, Edit, Create, and Fulfill Orders from Admin Panel
• Create Multiple Invoices, Shipments, and Credit Memos Per Order for Split Fulfillment
• Print Invoices and Packing Slips
• Call Center Order Creation
• Create Re-orders for Customers from Administration Panel
• E-mail Notifications of Orders
• RSS Feed of New Orders

He also briefly mentions a test he performed with the Opera browser versus Firefox in working with his Magento install. A bug causing sporadic crashes in Firefox was nowhere to be seen in Opera - though there was an issue with cookie propagation.