Entries by Solomon K. Chang

Magento is an Open Source e-commerce web application created by Varien, building on components of the Zend Framework. In addition to being open source, various commercial additions are available as well, from hosting plans to pre-built style templates. With Magento, you can get your e-commerce site up and running in minimal time. Magento also has integrated features reminiscent of modern e-commerce sites, including:
- Flexible Coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products, and categories.
- Catalog Promotional Pricing by percentage or fixed amount with ability to restrict to stores, categories, products.
- Multi-Tier Pricing for quantity discounts.
- Bundled Products.
- Customer Group-specific pricing and group-specific tier pricing.
- Up-sells in Shopping Cart.
- Cross-sells on product pages.

This talk will go into the basics of installing Magento and getting a basic ecommerce site up in going in record time.

Alas, the Tom Bradley Center has pre-empted our venue this month for a charitable event. Not to dismay, I have been in contact with Charlie Semple of LACS, and we are invited to attend their Christmas party this year. Theirs will be held at:

Fellowship Hall of Westchester United Methodist Church
8065 Emerson Ave.
Westchester, CA. 90045

For those who are map-challenged, a link.

This is kinda sorta a potluck. Please bring food that can be eaten with fingers, and does not require on-site cooking or heating. So, that fondue fountain with the now-solidified stream of milk chocolate is out.

You are still welcome to show up at our regular venue, at our regular time, and bring a brand new toy to children in need.

SCALE is coming in February, and LAMPSIG will once again set up a exhibit!

However, exhibits don't run themselves and need people, henceforth known as "Exhibitionists".
Do you want to help the community and educate passers-by about the benefits of LAMP?
Do you want to meet fellow open-source enthusiasts?
Do you want to attend SCALE 7x for free?

Then show up this Saturday - we're still planning the next kick-ass booth application for this year, and discussions are definitely still open.

By Jorge Garifuna

WordPress is an open source blog publishing application. WordPress is the official successor of b2\cafelog, developed by Michel Valdrighi. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of lead developer Matt Mullenweg.

This talk will cover the following topics:

- Easy setup and installation of Wordpress
- Getting your feet wet with WordPress by writing posts, creating pages among other things
- Organizing your blog posts into categories
- Efficient ways to manage comments in WordPress
- Changing the look-and-feel theme of your WordPress site
- Installing WordPress plugins, such as images, Recent comments, Spelling checker, and Google AdSense among many
- Special references to community sites

Jorge Garifuna is the CEO of Garinet Media Network, LLC. , which offers a
multitude of Web Development services for organizations, businesses,
entertainers and family members. Jorge joined LAMPsig over two years ago and
has added a new spark of enthusiasm to our group. He is quick to answer
mail-list questions or bring up new topics of interest to LAMP developers.
You may learn more about Jorge's technical background and expertise at
http://www.jgari.com/resume

By Solomon Chang

Maatkit (available at http://www.maatkit.org) makes MySQL easier and safer to manage. It provides simple, predictable ways to do things you cannot otherwise do. It would be nice if these features were included with MySQL, but they are not. That's why Maatkit is now shipping by default with many GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian and CentOS.

You can use Maatkit to prove replication is working correctly, fix corrupted data, automate repetitive tasks, speed up your servers, and much, much more.

And best of all, Maatkit is Free Software so you can modify, inspect, and redistribute it yourself.