One of the benefits of conferences such as last week's CMS Expo are the opportunities to come across content management systems you know nothing about. Such was the case for me when I was introduced to Wondercode, a content management and e-commerce solution developed by a Norwegian company. My introduction to Wondercode was in a showcase session with Sven-Erik Knoff as the presenter. 

Hundreds of corporate and commercial websites run Wondercode, each with their own unique twist and functionality. This panel will go in depth in showing you just how flexible, customizable and powerful Wondercode is

Showcase sessions are good, but they don't always give you a chance to see the backend where users and administrators of a CMS are likely to spend some of their time. Luckily for the audience, the presenter also had time at the end of the session to give us a brief tour of Wondercode's user interface and required workflow.

A few years ago, I had developed an online store for a buddy of mine using osCommerce. I had hoped to use Joomla! or Drupal for the site but at the time wasn't satisfied with the shopping cart extensions or modules that were available for either CMS. Shortly after developing that site a new eCommerce module for Drupal became available called Ubercart. I've never had taken on the task of building another online store (it was a lot of work) but I've always kept my eye on Ubercart just to stay informed.

Ryan Szrama who has been the project lead of Ubercart from its beginning posted yesterday that Ubercart will fork into Drupal Commerce. At this time it is now known what will become of Ubercart. Ryan writes:

A rose by any other name is still a rose, and Ubercore by any other name is still the best thing to happen for Drupal based e-commerce since the advent of Ubercart. For at least the foreseeable future, Ubercore will continue as Drupal Commerce, managed similarly to Drupal itself. We'll be working our tails off to make sure e-commerce on Drupal 7 shows just how awesome having fields in core can be.

As often happens in open source, the trademark owner and some of Ubercart's developers are in disagreement with the direction Ubercart should take in new development. Luckily, for Ryan and the developers of the new project, Ubercart is under the open source GPL license which allows them to use all of source code for Drupal Commerce. This should be an interesting story to follow in the world of open source CMS.

There are very few shopping carts or ecommerce platforms that I'm willing to talk about on a blog for content management systems. For whatever reason, I have always had interest in the Magento Ecommerce platform. The following is a video on the features included in the Magento Enterprise Edition 1.6.

Not sure if I'm early or late to the party, but I just discovered Mixergy.com. Mixergy is a place where 20ish Andrew Warner wants to help ambitious people who love business as much as he does to learn from a mix of experienced mentors. Somebody on the Internet wanting to help you make money, imagine that.

However Mixergy has something that many sites don't have...fantastic interviews of some very influential Web people. Some of the videos that caught my attention included interviews of Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and most recently, Roy Rubin of Magento. I recommend checking Mixergy.com out.

Last week, Varien and Magento announced an alternative to the community open source Magento ecommerce platform.  That alternative is Magento Enterprise Edition.

Today marks a major milestone for Varien and Magento with the release of the Magento Enterprise Edition. The product is a culmination of months of work and countless feedback from our community, partners and customers. The commercially licensed Magento Enterprise Edition software is the premium grade Magento product. It is geared towards larger companies and includes additional features, including ROI specific features, not available in our open source, Community Edition product. In addition to features, our Enterprise Edition will include SLA based support with guaranteed response times, warranties, indemnification and soon, PA-DSS certification. Learn more about the Enterprise Edition product and compare product editions.

With the launch of our Enterprise Edition, it is important to note our commitment to the open source, Community Edition product. The release of the Magento Enterprise Edition aids us by allowing us to focus on the distinct groups of Magento users, small or large, and to engage each according to their needs, and now, contribute more time and resources to the success of each. More information regarding our community and open source initiatives is detailed below.

For those that are used to getting open source Magento for "free", the starting price of $8,900 USD for the Enterprise Edition may be a little shocking.  However, it's important to note that the Enterprise edition isn't geared toward those smaller "mom and pop" online stores.  Instead the Magento Enterprise edition is intended for those larger corporations that want guarantees in the products they purchase including warranty, indemnification, and full product support via an SLA.

What else does the $8,900 or more give you that the Community Edition (without extensions) doesn't give you?  Some of the additional benefits of the Enterprise Edition over the Community Edition include:

• Advanced Administrator Roles and Permission Restriction per Site (Website and Store View)
• Logging of Administrator Actions
• Gift Certificates/Cards (Physical and Virtual)
• Customer Store Credits
• Content Staging and Merging. Support for both on-demand and scheduled merges and rollbacks of content
• Limited Catalog Access. Category View and Purchase permissions per on customer group
• Private Club Sales including Events, Invitations and Category access permissions
• Strong Data Encryption

Apparently, the introduction of the Enterprise Edition does not mean there will be less support and development for the Community Edition of Magento.  In fact since the announcement of the Enterprise Edition, version 1.3.1 of Magento Community has been released.

A new version of the eccomerce platform, Magento, was released on these last days of March. New features and improvements included in Magento 1.3 since the release of version 1.2 include:

• Added support for customer file upload and date/time/datetime custom options
• Described all methods in WSDL for SOAP web-services to improve compatibility with .NET, Java and other languages
• Frontend Flat Catalog and improved performance. From early test and benchmarks the developers are seeing up to a 40% performance improvement when comparing to Magento 1.2.x both in page loads and memory usage.

That 40% improvement is substantial and the Magento folks are promising the release of more formal resting results soon.