von It’s hard to believe that the latest post in this blog has been written about half a year ago. And even in this post talking about doodling away time trying to catch as many news items as possible to work them into blog posts – Inform(procrastin)ation– the general tone was something like “Gee, I’m too busy, I cannot be bothered with following the news anymore.” I’m more than happy to say that this is a thing from the past, from now I’ll more than happily indulge myself into the comings and goings of the Web – again. After all, why else would I’ve ordered a bloody iPad?
International eCommerce
The last six months have been an extraordinary experience. I got the chance to participate in relaunching some international brands on the basis of Magento by working as a project manager and a consultant. My daily routine involved numerous telephone conferences to get the different parties involved aligned, travelling and basically constantly juggling and processing of information. I had the feeling to be working on the forefront of development in the Magento world and to be doing meaningful work and helped shaping online stores that would eventually be seen by a lot of people around the globe. And I think I was.
However, as exciting as this challenge has been, it has clearly had some downsides which have led me to get out of this corporate ecommerce world in a rather unexpected manner. Suffice it to say that the everyday routine was not only a challenging with regard to time spent working (and not with family and friends), but also in view of physical health. After having been disconnected from the web for more than a month now I’m slowly getting back on track – getting my voice back.
This post and the relaunch of this blog does not only mean the new beginning of something that has been neglected for some time, but actually feels a bit like going back in time and continue where I have left off somewhere at the beginning of this year.
Magento
As one can imagine, I have spend quite a bit of time with this piece of software that has kind of ripped me out of my tranquil, doing-oscommerce-style-webshops-way-of-freelance-life in 2008. Ever since I came across Magento – one of the earlier posts was a longish rant on its poor performance – got asked to write a book on it (Online-Shops mit Magento (German), published by O’Reilly) I got to know the software closer, being able to provide training to those wanting to learn using it. In the last couple of weeks I have finalised the developer handbook for Magento (Magento – Das Handbuch für Entwickler) together with my pal Vinai Kopp and it’s planned to finally hit the shelves any day now.
I consider Magento a great application, however, having dealt with its nuts and bolts for quite a while now I can hardly only see things through rose-coloured glasses. Like with most other OS software out there, there are (annoying) issues which need to be addressed, both on the organisational and the technological level.
But there’s the rub: this blog (or rather its German predecessor) was originally planned to provide regular updates on recent developments in eCommerce – independent of software. Being part of the Magento scene (which I’m still very happy to be, no doubt about that), however, makes it harder to stay unbiased and take an objective view of the matter. I would like to take the opportunity and regain some of this pre-Magento independence and look at other software/concepts as well. For example, how does Oxid do in the OS world, which are the reasons why enterprises often opt for WebSphere and Demandware and how do new and lightweight systems such as Goodsie fit into the picture?
I’m looking forward to chasing the world of ecom again. And I invite everybody to have a read and add his/her opinion – it’s about different voices after all.
