Last week in Lesson 2: Magento ecosystem I mentioned Magento Connect: the extension database for Magento connect. As you subscribed to the RSS feed, you've seen that 32 new extensions were added to the database. My feed reader shows an average of 44,1 posts (= new extensions) per week so this was a relatively 'quiet' week for Magento Connect...
This week I'd like to dig a little deeper into the use of Magento extensions: the peaces of code with which you can extend Magento's own functionality. In my opinion, the extendability of Magento itself and the existence of a marketplace filled with many (4600+) extensions is a big part of the success of Magento. The same is true for systems like Wordpress, Joomla and also for the iPhone with its Appstore. But this also creates a problem for us as advisors. Clients might see certain functionality available as an extension and immediately assume this to be 1) free or very cheap to implement and 2) easily to integrate with their current shop en extensions. Sometimes that's true, most often, there's a little more to it...
How to assess the quality of an extension?
If the quality checked out that's great! But not enough for a 'go' on implementation. Here are some other considerations to be made:
As you might've noticed: it's actually a lot about communication with your client and managing expectations. If you get that right, you're halfway there. Tasks for this week:
A hierarchy of evidence (or levels of evidence) is a heuristic used to rank the relative strength of results obtained from scientific research. I've created a version of this chart/pyramid applied to CRO which you can see below. It contains the options we have as optimizers and tools and methods we often use to gather data.
This is a bonus episode with Emily Robinson (Senior Data Scientist at Warby Parker) en Lukas Vermeer (Director of Experimentation at Booking.com). In her earlier session that day, Emily said that real progress starts when you put your work online for others to see and comment on which in this case was about Github. Someone from the audience wondered how that works out in larger companies where a manager or even a legal department might not be overly joyous about that to say the least so I asked Emily about her thoughts on that. Recorded live with audience pre-covid-19 at the Conversion Hotel conference in november 2019 on the island of Texel in The Netherlands. (oorspronkelijk gepubliceerd op https://www.cro.cafe/)