It's bad business to build a site these days that is not optimized for the mobile browsers used by an increasing share of the market. And soon, it will also be necessary to facilitate mobile ecommerce in order to make sales and stay competitive. People are using their iPhones, Blackberries and other handhelds for pretty much everything, from scheduling to videography, and shopping is the next big thing.

Luckily for all us open source loyalists, we too will be able to ride this wave into the future of e-business. Varien has annouced the pre-release of Magento Mobile, a robust and fully functional mobile app for the powerful Magento ecommerce platform. Soon your visitors will be able to purchase your products wherever they are - upping your sales, your visibility, and your tech cred.

Integration into your existing online storefront means you only need to work from one catalogue, with one set of configurations and customizations. You won't need to spend money designing separate, unique mobile apps - Magento lets you pick and choose the features you want, and you pay accordingly. Even better, for a low monthly fee Magento will manage the maintenance and lifecycles of the app, staying on top of versioning, iTunes updates, and bugfixing so you don't have to. They're even working on iPad and Android platforms, assuring you stay a step ahead of the marketplace.

Magento Mobile is currently in a limited release - Make Good Media plans to be one of the first to use and implement this technology for our clients. We'll keep you posted on this exciting development as it happens.

As a Magento developer it’s necessary to have some good and updated online resources around. Really useful Magento Blogs are pretty rare, we have summarized the essential ones which we regularly read on ourselves. So, be sure to take a look at the following Blogs, some of them are more advanced and active than others. If you know any more Magento Developer Blogs, go ahead and write down a comment.
 
Sometimes Blog authors might discuss approaches and concepts regarding Magento development, and suggest modifying core code to illustrate their approach. Please be aware, that you should never do that on a live store – you will lose the ability to upgrade your installation without breaking that feature. Always capsule your changes in a Magento module.

International Blogs

1. ActiveCodeline

Branko Ajzele is working full time as a Senior Web Developer at Inchoo. He is furthermore the initiator and owner of snippi.net and writes about Magento coding. Visit Branko Ajzele’s Magento Blog…

2. Baobaz

The Baobaz guys, based in France and Poland, write about Magento in general, Magento modules, extensions and templates and Magento related Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Visit Baobaz Magento Blog…

3. Developer Zone

Josh Pratt is a web developer in Bloomington, Minnesota – working at a company called August Ash. Currently, he is most involved in learning and implementing Magento. Visit Josh Pratt’s Magento Blog…

4. Fontis

Fontis is a team of passionate developers and IT professionals from Australia. They’re quite famous for their free Magento Community Extensions, like the WYSIWYG editor. Visit Fontis Magento Blog…

5. Inchoo

Inchoo is a developer studio from Croatia, specializing in developing eCommerce solutions using Magento as a platform for most of their projects. Visit Inchoo’s Magento Blog…

6. Richard Castera

Richard Castera is an Application Developer and Designer from New York. He provides nice and useful tips as well as code snippets for the Magento Community. Visit Richard Castera’s Magento Blog…

7. Robertson & Associates

Robertson & Associates is basically a creative agency based in Abingdon, United Kingdom. They write about Magento in general and coding. Visit Robertson & Associates Magento Blog…

8. Official Magento Blog

There’s nothing much to say, the official Magento Blog brings you the official stuff at first hand. It’s less useful for practises than for getting general information about the system. Visit the Official Magento Blog…

9. MageDev

“MageDev” is a Magento developer and Zend PHP 5 certified engineer from Manchester, United Kingdom. He’s writing about solutions for problems which pop up in his daily Magento life. Visit MageDev’s Magento Blog…

I just imported a ton of products for new website that I’m working on, and it turns out that the client misnamed a bunch of images, causing Magento to ignore the image import for those ones.