Hello, dear Magento Connect statistics fans!

June changed May, and summer followed spring. What thoughts has a new season brought? Dreaming about holidays, sunbathing, beaches, traveling, picnics or just idleness? All these ideas are pleasant and rest is very important for everybody. But all in good time, and now let’s turn to Magento Connect May Statistics.

In May there were no serious additional factors that could influence the growth of extensions in subcategories. Nevertheless the results look a bit unexpected. The leaders are familiar to the regular readers of our monthly Magento Connect Statistics reports. But the quantitative changes can be surprising. They can be explained as after-effect of great changes that were brought to the Magento Connect extension marketplace in February. But it’s time to look at numbers.

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Summer is the time of vacations. That’s why I tried to make this monthly aheadWorks newsletter as short as possible. So it won’t take much of your time to find out the information on new and updated Magento extensions.

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Editor’s Note: The series of posts about Magento education for users and developers are provided exclusively for our blog by Graeme Caldwell, an inbound marketer for Nexcess.

We have already taken a look at six best Magento resources for online retailers. It’s time to address a thriving community of developers. Two of the causes of Magento’s immense popularity are its openness and extensibility. Anyone willing to learn PHP can develop an understanding of how Magento works under the hood.

Whether you want to become a Magento master, develop a decent comprehension of how Magento works to be a better retailer, or simply scratch an itch by creating an extension that adds functionality, there are plenty of freely available resources for learning how to hack on Magento.

It can be hard to find the diamonds in the rough when it comes to educational material on the Internet, so we’ve compiled a list of six resources that every Magento developer should have bookmarked.

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Recently we shared the review of “Magento PHP Developer’s Guide” where you can find our independent unbiased opinion on this newly published tutorial.

Now we prepared some cool stuff for our blog readers! I have teamed up with Packt Publishing to organize a Giveaway of the “Magento PHP Developer’s Guide”. Five lucky winners stand a chance to get 5 digital copies of their new book. Keep reading to find out how YOU can be one of the Lucky Winners.

How to Enter?
All you need to do is head on over to our review of “Magento PHP Developer’s Guide” page. Then look through it and drop a comment below this post to let us know what interests you the most about this book. It’s that simple.

Winners will get an e-copy of the guide.

Deadline
The contest will close June 30, 2013. Winners will be contacted by email, so be sure to use your real email address when you comment!

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A large number of companies try to integrate game mechanics into different kinds of consumer-facing websites. Now, when the eCommerce Gamification Suite extension is officially released, this business practice is also available for Magento stores owners.

Due to eCommerce Gamification Suite, merchants can drive wanted behaviors and promote friendly competition within the site community. The module brings game fun and excitement to the shopping process. It allows to stimulate users with game points, achievements and ranks for performed positive actions.

Customers are involved into the catching game created by the eCommerce Gamification Suite extension. Clients do their best to fulfill the conditions set by store administrators and occupy the leading positions in the Top Chart.

We are glad to inform that the eCommerce Gamification Suite extension is available in our store to help you motivate the activity of users.

Look at the key extension features:

• Points
• Achievements
• Ranks
• Live Stream
• Top Chart
• User Public Profile

Interested in this module and want to get it? Visit the eCommerce Gamification Suite page right now.

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We were lucky to get one of a few copies of “Magento PHP Developer’s Guide“. It was published in April 2013 by Packt Publishing Ltd., one of the most prolific and fast-growing tech book publishers in the world.

Allan MacGregor, the author of “Magento PHP Developer’s Guide”, has a reputation for being professional, skilled and accurate developer easy to work with. I have happened to communicate with Allan and I should say that he is very responsive and friendly as well.

Allan MacGregor started working with Magento when he was a freelance developer little over 4 years ago and now he is a Magento Certified Developer Plus.

“Before Magento, creating an ecommerce website was difficult, expensive and slow,” tells Allan. “Magento changed all that! I enjoy working with Magento because it’s challenging, the framework is very powerful and flexible. And overall, I have fun working with Magento!”

Allan understood that there was a lot of information online, but he felt that there was a need for book that was an easy entry point for new developers and a bit of reference for developers that are not so new to Magento.

“I wanted to write the book that I wished I had when I was starting with Magento. A guide that covers the fundamentals, that gives me the tools to start developing with Magento.”

And Allan did it. Though it was his first writing experience, “Magento PHP Developer’s Guide” turned to be an easily accessible tutorial, designed and written to give the reader maximum understanding of the powerful Magento framework.

Continue reading this post to find out aheadWorks impressions on guide illustrations, contents, and writing style.

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Editor’s Note: The series of posts about Magento education for users and developers are provided exclusively for our blog by Graeme Caldwell, an inbound marketer for Nexcess.

Magento is by far the world’s most popular open source online retail platform. Much of that popularity is the result of Magento being a very powerful piece of software while at the same time having a fairly low barrier to entry. Anyone with the dream of selling online can have a store with all the features they need to make their business a success.

However, like any complex piece of software, Magento comes with a learning curve. Online retail is a specialized domain of knowledge. Access to decent learning resources can make the difference between getting a Magento store deployed and generating revenue quickly and wasting time making needless mistakes.

Fortunately, both Magento and its community have created a large amount of valuable educational material and made it freely available. In this article we’ll have a look at six of the best resources for getting up to speed on our favorite retail platform.

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