Linde002::PHP

The opening keynote today was given by the guys from Varien which is to Magento what Zend is to PHP. Even though it was quite a commercial talk there were a couple of intersting highlights.

Firstly, the fact that they’d built their entire eCommerce framework with Zend Framework and built it fast. We’re talking about a huge codebase that can do almost anything you’d ever want your eCommerce site to do, and some things you don’t want. And they did it in 9 months.

The second thing is that they’ve built this framework themselves, released it as an opensource tool and just deliver professional services to customers that need help with installing, customizing, managing etc.

And finally they showed me a concept I wasn’t familiar with, social shopping, it basically ties social elements from social networks to their webshop. Wikipedia has this to say:

“Social shopping is a method of e-commerce and of traditional shopping in which consumers shop in a social networkingMySpace. Using the wisdom of crowds, users communicate and aggregate information about products, prices, and deals. Many sites allow users to create custom shopping lists and share them with friends.

Others concentrate on the user interactions consisting information and recommendations that are hard to acquire from the actual sales personnel. Some services even allow users to shop together synchronously to complete the social environment Social shopping sites can generate revenue not only from advertising and click throughs, but also by sharing information about their users with retailers”

This is a concept I’ve seen before but never saw it as a design concept.