I have been relatively quiet about my day job in the past. I was unsure if they would have an appreciation for sharing my knowledge and experiences. However, I have discussed my blog with the company I work for and they have given me their blessing to share more knowledge and some source code (with some modifications).
So let me formally introduce my job and my roll. I am currently the Lead Developer for Working Person’s Enterprises. WPE is a holding company for AVID Commerce as well as the Working Person’s Store. The Working Person’s Store is an online retailer of work footwear, clothing, and other items that “the working person” would require in their day to day jobs.
AVID Commerce is an online programming consultancy that specializes in creating eCommerce websites, however we have also done custom programming.
About 2 years ago we began transitioning from using an in-house developed eCommerce platform to Magento. It was a pretty difficult choice to make as a company as we spent countless hours developing our own platform, but the feature set for Magento was far more advanced than what we had created. We decided that we would use Magento and concentrate on making great websites.
The first project we undertook with Magento was recreating WorkingPerson.com to run on Enterprise Edition. We worked on the website for around 9 months before launching. Most of the work was spent on migrating around 150,000 SKUs, 150,000 customer accounts, and 2 years worth of order information.
At this time, Magento programming documentation was non-existent (you may think there is nothing now, but believe me there was even less back then) so everything took much longer than it should have. In fact, the order migration took almost 4 months to accomplish. I had to guess may way through taking an export of an order, creating it inside of Magento, and fully processing the order so it looked completed (which means invoiced and shipped).
So this is a nice story, but what does this mean for you the reader? Well, I get to reference a lot of the different modifications we have made to Magento while giving real world references.
Almost everything I will show you will be done “the proper way”, however I am sure there will be instances where I will demonstrate things how they were done in the “real world”. Sometimes when you are in the real world you have to do things quickly to get them done correctly.
I am excited to be able to show you how we have made Magento work for us in the coming weeks.
