I think it would be fair to say that there is some excitement in the office today over the release of the new iPad.

Displaying Salesforce content in TYPO3

We've been getting a lot of requests lately for Salesforce integration for both TYPO3 and Magento. Our latest work, spearheaded by team member Lars, is a Salesforce extension for TYPO3. Here's what we discovered along the way:

There are some great tools out there to help push and pull data from Salesforce, e.g. the Apex Data Loader and more advanced ETL tools like jitterbit and Informatica. But in a production environment, every tool brings a little overhead, so being able to talk directly to an API provides an opportunity to simplify things. Also, Salesforce has a rich API, so it made sense for us to invest some development time to produce tools to make routine Salesforce integration tasks easy. We developed and released the ID_salesforce extension for TYPO3, which, in its current state is a simple data synchronization extension that has a interactive mapper and scheduler. Long story short, it lets you import large SFDC datasets into TYPO3 and efficiently keep the dataset synchronized. We are pleased with the results and looking forward to extending it in the future.

Lars will do a follow-up post on with some technical details but for now you can read more on the forge page, or download it for the TYPO3 TER and take it for a spin.

And if you're in the area, come by the office for our upcoming Meetup to learn about the extension in person!

San Francisco TYPO3 Users Group

We?re excited to announce Infield Design is now officially a Magento partner. ID has been developing and implementing Magento commerce stores here in San Francisco since Magento's 1.0 launch. It has changed a lot since the early days and is more powerful than ever, and with a little experience, easy to maintain.

We are contacted by a lot of people interested in moving to Magento, asking us how the different Magento products stack-up. Here is a brief rundown.

Magento Go - Start right away

Go is Magento?s first Software as a Service (SaaS) offering. It brings with it the interfaces that have made Magento the most popular commerce solution. It is similar to services like Shopify but the big advantage is that if/once you out grow the SaaS model you can move up to a system with more power and flexibility without abandoning everything you?ve built thus far. Magento Go is it is a simplified version of their commercial solutions, so when you outgrow that simple store, Magento?s dedicated products will be familiar to you, making it a relatively simple transition.

Magento Professional - Start simple

Magento Professional is Magento?s entry-level dedicated, supported solution. Along with Store credits, Gift cards, Rewards points and PA-DSS compliance baked in, it also carries a warranty from Magento so you can be confident that your install is backed by Magento itself. Additionally, it offers a direct upgrade path to the Enterprise edition.

Magento CE - Start (less) simple

Community Edition (CE) can be thought of as the heart of the Magento commerce line, i.e. the engine of all the Magento commerce products. It is open source (free), frequently updated, and supported by the Magento community. CE is in some ways a testing platform that introduces new features (with some possible rough edges), and is used to make sure features are stable before they are rolled into Magento?s commercial products. This is why Magento CE has an accelerated release schedule and why it requires more support and maintenance than Enterprise.

Magento Enterprise -  Built to last

Then there is the Enterprise edition, bringing with it a slew of performance and feature enhancements such as Multi Store view, Private Sales, Rewards Points, Rich Merchandising Suite, Store Credits, Gift Cards, Customer Accounts, Customer-Assisted Checkout, and Gift Registry. It is also back by Magento?s Enterprise SLA, which guarantees your issues are addressed by the Magento team itself should problems arise. This all comes together to ensure your company a rock-solid foundation for commerce. If an unscheduled outage is not an option, Enterprise is the version for you.

Which is right for you?

All the Magento products are all very different, so choosing your solution comes down to internal resources, cost, and stability. What are your impressions?

When a client requested an iPhone/iPad compatible version of a Michael Bublé promo site for the Beringer Winery, we needed an efficient way to implement a base animation without getting into jQuery hell--implementing the existing flash animations in a javascript framework would be time consuming and put us over budget.

Enter Sencha Animator

Sencha Animator is a desktop application that creates CSS3 animations for WebKit browsers and touchscreen mobile devices. Not all platforms are supported, but those with the largest current market share are iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Safari, BlackBerry Torch, Android, and Chrome. The platform question comes up a lot and it seems like the bigger the client, the more out of date their technology (can you say Home Depot in IE6?) But with WebKit controlling about 70% of the US mobile market, and its share of the mobile market growing, it is a good base line.
The Sencha Animator timeline interface will be familiar to anyone with Flash experience. Using the same assets that were generated to produce the original Flash introduction, we were able to create a functional prototype in hours as opposed to days. The final results were predictable and easy to integrate into the mobile view of TYPO3 and Magento.

Still in beta (regular beta, not Google-beta) Animator is already solid performer. Developed with hooks for advanced interaction by the group that has brought us ExtJS & Sencha Touch, Animator’s future is bright. We’re looking forward to the fit and finish the production release will bring.