Edmonds Commerce are currently recruiting for a highly talented and creative web design professional to join our team.

You will be working with our core clients on a variety of design tasks including mailshots, banners and other related tasks. You will also be involved in creating brand new designs for clients looking to rebrand their existing sites or set up a whole new site.

We are based in Shipley which is very easy to get to from both Leeds and Bradford areas. It is also easy enough to get to from surrounding areas such as Huddersfield, Wakefield and Keighley thanks to having a well connected train station and easy road links. You can read more about our location here.

If you would like to join the team as a web designer please fill out the contact form below.

As you might be aware, the UK PHP Conference was held in London last weekend. Having been the lucky winner of a ticket from PHP NW I went along.

The Venue

The conference was held in The Brewery in London city centre, a well suited conference centre with a variety of different conference rooms. An old Whitbread brewery, it was modern and practical while still maintaining enough of its history to keep its character. Overall the venue was great and it was good to have the variety of different rooms for all of the different events

The talks

The talks on offer were on a wide variety of subjects, varying from the very specific libraries to things of use to any PHP developer. Each of the talks was led by a volunteer giving up their time to speak about a subject for which they held a passion, it came across very well and as ever is good to hear from active members of the community.

Talks I found to be of particular interest were

• The Future of the PHP Development Environment A practical introduction to Vagrant, demonstrating its purpose in creating a reliable, predictable server environment. Covered was the installation, configuration and use of the software
• OpenStreetMap for the Web An enthusiastic demonstration of the power of having openly accessible data of the world’s maps and the APIs which enable a plethora of different applications
• A Hands-On Introduction to Writing Unit Tests Using PHPUnit A very practical (with live coding and demonstration of the Unit Tests, a risky move that paid off) intro to unit tests in PHP. Aimed at the very beginner, it started slowly with very simple tests but showed the power of them in much bigger projects

In summary

I thoroughly enjoyed the day, and would recommend anyone wanting to attend in future. The talks will be posted on the PHP UK website in the coming weeks so you should be able to get a sample of the events there

I’m really happy to announce that two of our team have now taken and passed the Magento Certified Developer exam. This means that they are now officially “Magento Certified Developers”.

What that means for you is that you can be assured that we have the in house skills and experience to work the right way with Magento and really help you get the most out of the platform.

The reason we finally put them forward for the exam is that, after working with the platform for a few years now, we have decided to go down the official Magento partner route and get all the qualification and assurance that you could ask for by becoming an Silver Magento Partner and employing developers who are not only Zend Certified Engineers – a PHP qualification – but also Magento Certified Developers.

The exam asks questions on a wide range of Magento topics ranging from the basics through to layout, rendering and then more complex subjects such as the checkout, sales, API and more. You can download the official Magento Certified Developer study guide to see the full details of the areas that are discussed though suffice to say it is really quite in depth and broad. You definitely need to know Magento well to pass the exam.

For those that care the passing mark for the exam is 37 out of 70 questions. Our devs passed with 54/70 and 52/70 so really nailed it!

Smart TVs are still quite a new concept to many people. At Edmonds Commerce we believe that Smart TVs and other smart appliances will be the future. As the television is already a screen based system it is really well suited to become a web enabled and smart device. Online streaming services such as the BBC’s iPlayer and platforms like NetFlix and LoveFilm are already well established as internet based media streaming platforms and many consumer televisions are already smart enough to consume these channels natively.

The real smart television revolution is going to be based around custom applications for the smart tvs, available via an app store. There is also many exciting opportunities for custom smart television applications for a wide variety of business applications including things like live information displays, connected messaging systems, warehouse management systems, live graphs and business information displays and all kinds of other ideas – the sky is the limit.

If you would like to discuss your smart tv app idea with a specialist development agency, give Edmonds Commerce a call today!

If you are looking for a web development agency that specialises and Magento and only the most highly skilled, Zend Certified PHP developers and specialises entirely on ecommerce PHP development then you have come to the right place.

Edmonds Commerce Ltd are a UK Magento specialist agency who have been working with Magento since the beginning. We can help you with all kinds of technical Magento requirements including Magento upgrades, custom Magento extensions, API integrations, bug fixing – you name it, we can (and probably already have) done it with Magento.

So get in touch today and speak to one of our Magento specialists to see how we can help you get the most out of Magento.

OpenERP is a fully featured enterprise class open source ERP system that thanks to it’s modular structure can support all kinds of business models and requirements ranging from Retail to E-Commerce to Manufacturing to Services and beyond.

OpenERP is written in a language called Python, widely regarded as an excellent language thanks to it’s power, cross platform compatibility and ease of development.

Thanks to being open source, you can experiment or even implement OpenERP for you business without any up front costs, licence costs, vendor lock in or any of the other big drawbacks of standard paid for ERP packages.

This means you can dip your toe in the water initially and roll out further integration and functionality as you are ready for it and your business requires it.

There is a wide global network of specialist agencies supporting the OpenERP package and at it’s centre is a large development house based in Belgium that is entirely devoted to the platform. This kind of business backed open source package is great news for you because it ensures that there will be professional support and training available and you can expect the platform to continue developing in the future, making it an excellent platform to invest into.

This is similar to the way that Magento, our most highly recommended open source ecommerce package, is backed by Varien – a large and well funded company that is pushing the platform and really making it an enterprise class platform.

Of course the logical best of breed combination is to use the awesome front end functionality of Magento for your e-commerce stores and hook this into OpenERP’s excellent business management functionality.

If you would like to discuss OpenERP or Magento or of course both for your business, get in touch today.

Looking for UK based Python development services, you have come to the right place. Edmonds Commerce can help you with your Python requirements.

Python is an excellent choice of language for anything from simple scripts up to large scale applications. Python applications can be fast and yet easy to work on.

There are a number of excellent Python based applications out there such as OpenERP and the Django web framework.

Get in touch with Edmonds Commerce about Python today.

After a few enquiries, we are looking into the possibility of setting up a Symfony training course based in Leeds in the UK.

At present this is not a firm plan but we are definitely looking into it and would really like some feedback on what kind of Symfony Training course you would like to see.

The course would likely be an introduction to the Symfony PHP framework, possibly going through the Jobeet sample site documentation which represents an excellent training framework.

At this stage it is not totally clear what we would need to include in the course, especially if we can expect candidates to already be familiar and confident with object oriented PHP. One option is that we do another course which is purely focussed on the object oriented aspects of PHP, like a crash course of OO PHP for coders who have no or little experience of this style of coding.

If you are interested and would like to share with us your ideas and expectations for a UK Symfony course please do get in touch. We will take your ideas on board and keep your info on file so we can let you know as and when the course goes live.

Contiuing my project to get my Mac to feel like a proper PC and not cause me mental strain every time I switch to it from Ubuntu, I have started using a proper UK keyboard and have now found out how to make it have the correct keymapping.

For full details go here:

http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2005/11/20/using_a_british.php

In a nutshell though:

download this file:

http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/resources/2005/11/20/british-windows-3.keylayout.gz

Then unzip it and put it in:

/Users/{yourname}/Library/Keyboard Layouts/

Then go to System Preferences - International - Input Menu

you should see just below british something called British 3. Tick that box and also ensure the box at the bottom is ticked (‘Show input menu in menu bar’)

Then restart the machine and you should have proper UK keyboard, with an easily accessible # key – woot!

If you have any Magento related questions and are struggling to get help on the main forums, or you just fancy somewhere a bit quieter and possibly more UK focussed to ask your magento related questions, then check out this UK Magento Forum.

We have been heavily involved in it from the outset and are currently commited to answering any questions that come up as helpfully and promptly as possible.