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On mid-October 2011, the X.commerce Innovate Developer Conference was organized by the eBay Ltd. in the Moscone Center, San Francisco. This year’s conference is all about the launch of the new E-Commerce platform: X.commerce, which brings together a whole set of commerce products and technologies from eBay, PayPal and Magento. Read more »

The Challenge

The Sweet Life group is an innovative producer of high quality sweeteners, breath mints and semi-pharmaceutical products. They have sales offices in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Russia, Hong Kong, and China. Boasting a European standard manufacturing facility located in the heart of the Pearl River delta in China, Sweet Life combines the best of both worlds to produce a creative range of sugar-free and special nutritive products. Sweet Life entrusts BysoftChina to develop a new website to present their company image, products, events and etc.

The Solution

Tailor-made Design:

Our senior designer in BysoftChina has created a whole set of cool and fancy looking visual elements, toreflect the style and feelaccording to the customer’s requirement. A huge amount of images with vivid colors make sure that the customer’s brand image will be easier to be remembered and liked by most of the Chinese market.

Content Management System:

• The project was built on world famous Joomla! CMS platform to help Sweet Life to easily manage entire website contents from a single menu item to page content.
• BysoftChina provided an easy-to-use product management system along with the CMS for products manipulation.

Multilingual Website:

The website is available in both English and Simplified Chinese, to meet the needs to promote the product and brand image to both Chinese and foreign end clients. Sweet Life could even add more and more language versions autonomously in the Backend.

The Results

With this new website based on the Joomla! Content Management System, Sweet Life can now easily update information, create new product, events, news and articles any time he wishes, using the powerful Backend interface of the system autonomously. This significantly reduces the trouble and the cost of demanding a third party company to modify codes for the website, just to add a presentation of a new product.

The Challenge

KAISER + KRAFT is one of the leading suppliers of office, workshop and warehouse equipment in the world with 44 subsidiaries in 27 countries throughout Europe, North America and Asia. KAISER + KRAFT China and KAISER + KRAFT Japan entrusted BysoftChina, a Magento Professional Partner, to deploy a new eCommerce system that supports their business goals in Asia-Pacific. This project required servers in Hong Kong, China Mainland and Japan, all of which demand a rigorous level of data synchronization and data security.

With multiple servers and multiple instances of Enterprise, KAISER + KRAFT takes full advantage of the Magento Enterprise content staging feature.

The Solution

BysoftChina introduced the idea of applying three separate Magento Enterprise systems into each server with data synchronization among the different servers using the Magento API. A backend tool allows the administrator to automatically synchronize product pricing and inventory data with the information on KAISER + KRAFT’s AS400 ERP system. With multiple servers and multiple instances of Enterprise, KAISER + KRAFT takes full advantage of the Magento Enterprise content staging feature. KAISER + KRAFT China and KAISER + KRAFT Japan are able to share a common backend with different administrators who are able to manage data on the Chinese and Japanese websites.

Managing Thousands & Thousands of Products

BysoftChina developed a complete and reliable data import module which saved significantly on data entry. With so many products (and sub-categories of products), Bysoft developed a grouped product structure for KAISER + KRAFT that allows the administrators to quickly and easily create and manage products at all levels. Bysoft and Magento made it easy for users to find any product among thousands of choices with intelligent search functionality and a multi-option filter in the product category page that helps direct users to requested product pages. Products are clearly displayed in tables that make it very intuitive for consumers to understand the product choices. The administrator can easily define which property to use in the filter and the order to display the products on the frontend.

Bysoft and Magento made it easy for users to find any product among thousands of choices with intelligent search functionality and a multi-option filter.

Bysoft designed the KAISER + KRAFT websites so that their completely localized online stores match the color scheme of their popular print catalogs, making adoption of the online stores easy and seamless for even the most loyal of catalog customers. Additional functional such as the ability to input a six digit product code to directly add the product into the shopping cart makes the shopping and purchasing process easier for consumers.

“We are happy that we chose BysoftChina as our partner because of their detailed planning, high quality standards and outstanding service. We are very pleased that Bysoft used Magento because we now have localized online stores with all of the functionality we need and backend integration that makes our system administrators happy,” said Liu Yang, Chief Marketing Office, KAISER + KRAFT China. With such a large product catalog, performance is critical to help ensure consumer satisfaction. Bysoft implemented the full-page caching and Solr search capabilities of Magento along with Layered Navigation Pro from Aitoc for the product list page.

“The flexibility of Magento Enterprise was a very large benefit for this implementation,” said Cyril Drouin, CEO of BysoftChina. “KAISER + KRAFT has around 100 attributes for each attribute set. This could have been very problematic, but not with Magento. The multistore capabilities of Magento allowed us to code once and implement twice (for China and Japan), saving time and money.”

Although a very complex implementation, Bysoft was able to launch both the China and Japan sites within a four month time frame. KAISER + KRAFT were pleased with the speed and quality of the implementation as well as the user friendly frontend and enriched backend features.

To download the full PDF version of this Case Study
Please click Here.

BysoftChina is now Zend solution partner. It also means Bysoftchina’s PHP is better and better.
PHP is a widely-used programming language especially suited for web development in a LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Today, many famous world-class websites are built on a PHP and LAMP platform: Facebook, Kaixin Wang, Youtube, Tudou, Yahoo, Sohu, Wikipedia, etc.

Zend PHP is a professional company. Because of their authority in international technology, Zend founder of the company and his groups are the core of leadership in the PHP and open source groups. It also has played a powerful role in promoting the rapid development of PHP.

BysoftChina is proud to become the only Zend solution partner in China. This partnership recognized our expertise in the PHP field: half of Zend PHP certified engineer numbers in China is coming from BysoftChina. We strongly believe that PHP allows to build efficiently websites and web applications.

Currently, BysoftChina takes pride in announcing that its PHP talents dispatch service is available, and provides PHP certified engineers for onsite projects in Clients’ office premises. You could outsource the complete development of your product to BysoftChina. BysoftChina undertakes the entire gamut of responsibilities – product planning, execution, deployment and support.

BysoftChina has just won the SME Excellency Award 2010 awarded each year by the French Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

This award is given to a French SME for its highly successful presence in China for many years. The selection of the winner is done according to various criteria such as: the market approach, business results and finally the prospects for growth.

It is for BysoftChina an important recognition of work achieved by its teams since the last five years as well in the approach of the Chinese market with a differentiated marketing positioning as the quality and expertise of the services provided.

BysoftChina is the only company in China certified with all leading Open Source Web technologies (Magento, eZ Publish, Drupal, PHP) and has the largest number of certified engineers on PHP technology, among its employees.

Our ambition for the next years is to offer our customers more comprehensive services around our four offers:

• The implementation of platform and e-commerce site
• The creation of inter/intra/extranet portal
• The technology consulting around the PHP technology
• The establishment of foreign brands and companies on the Chinese Web

BysoftChina has three offices (Shanghai, Guangzhou and Wuhan) and one hundred employees in all web business: Consulting, Web Design, Technology, and E-Marketing.

In the 21st century, Chinese economy is developing rapidly whereas e-commerce is growing quietly on the historical scale. Chinese e-commerce trading volume in 2009 amounted to 3.85 trillion RMB, while in 2010, is exceeded 4 trillion RMB.  (http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90778/90860/7260847.html )

At this stage, Chinese e-commerce is still at the initial stage and many aspects are still not perfect. Even many merchants are not still fully aware of the importance of e-commerce. The data provided by iResearch Consulting Group shows that from 2008 to 2010, the Chinese buyer’s market size of B2C e-commerce in annual 75% of the speed in growth. We can be sure that the next decade will be the decade of rapid development of e-commerce. We can foresee that, according to the following observations:

1. The traditional business model is restricted to an area, whereas e-commerce is not concerned by area restriction. As long as web can be found, the e-commerce is able to exist. As we know, the web is everywhere.

2. Ecommerce reduces the cost. Indeed, the transaction costs and intermediate links are reduced, therefore the transaction is possible between manufacturers and consumers Of course, this will greatly reduce the cost sales for the enterprises.

3. Less advertising costs. E-commerce advertising is carried on the web, from the multi-channel approach to the full range of coverage. Compared to traditional advertising, e-commerce requires less advertising costs.

4. Easy e-commerce. The future world is a network world. Merchants who want to have a foothold in this world can do it very simply, actually, they only need their own website. Then they can start a full range of marketing to promote their website and products.

In short, e-commerce has become a trend in contemporary business. The sooner you start e-commerce the more successful you will be.

Firstly, please check the technical manual if you are not familiar with the configuration concept in eZ Publish.

In this article I will provide a short article about reading order of configuration file. I assume that you have already used eZ Publish in real projects and have idea about configuration (ini) in eZ Publish.

What is configuration’s order? When a siteaccess is used, eZ Publish reads the configuration files using the following sequence:

0 Default configuration settings – /settings/*.ini?

1 Active extension siteaccesses – /extension/my_extension/settings/siteaccess/my_site/*.ini.append.php

2 Siteaccesses                             - /settings/siteaccess/my_site/*.ini.append.php?

3 Active extensions                    – /extension/my_extension/settings/*.ini[.append.php]?

4 Global overrides                     – /settings/override/*.ini.append.php

In other words, eZ Publish will first read the default configuration settings. Secondly, it will read my_site/*.ini.append.php to find the siteaccesses for the active extensions during the installation. Then, it will determine which siteaccess to use according to the rules defined in the global override for “site.ini” (“/settings/override/site.ini.append.php”). When it knows which siteaccess to use, it will go into the directory of that siteaccess and read the configuration files belonging to that siteaccess. Lastly, it will go into the configuration file for the active extensions and read the configuration files for the active extensions. The settings of the siteaccess will override the default configuration settings.

But, if we have many extensions providing similar configuration information, which one we should use? That’s the issue about configuration override among extensions.

For example:

`– extension

|– ini_1

|   `– settings

|       `– test.ini.append.php

`– ini_2

`– settings

`– test.ini.append.php

And content of test.ini.append.php in ini_1 extension is:

[IniOrderTest]

CurrrentActiveName=ini_1

As you may guess, content of test.ini.append.php in ini_2 will be:

[IniOrderTest]

CurrrentActiveName=ini_2

So, if we want to read content of ‘CurrentActiveName’ in block ‘IniOrderTest’, which value should it be? The truth is: it depends on the load order of extensions.

For eZ Publish version less than 4.3, the load order is defined in ‘ActiveExtensions[]‘ under ‘ExtensionSettings’ block. For example:

[ExtensionSettings]

ActiveExtensions[]

ActiveExtensions[]=ini_1

ActiveExtensions[]=ini_2

Then the value for ‘CurrentActiveName’ in block ‘IniOrderTest’ should be ‘ini_1′, because eZ Publish uses prepending order to register extensions into configuration list during the activation of extensions. That means eZ Publish firstly activates extension ‘ini_1′ and register this extension into the list, then activates extension ‘ini_2′ and prepends ‘ini_2′ into the list. So, at the moment of reading configuration value, the order will firstly be ‘ini_2′, then ‘ini_1′.

The situation has changed since eZ Publish 4.4. This version introduces a new concept about extension dependency called ‘topology’. You can have a look at ‘extension.xml’ file in ezOE extension, which required ‘ezjscore’ extension as defined.

Let’s see how ‘extension.xml’ affects the result of configuration. We define dependency in ini_2 as following:

<dependencies>

<uses>

<extension name=”ini_1″ />

</uses>

</dependencies>

The word ‘extends’ define the ‘before’ relation, and words ‘required’ or ‘uses’ define the ‘after’ relation. The above example means that extension ‘ini_2’ uses extension ‘ini_1′, so the extension ‘ini_1’ should be firstly activated. Actually, this relation can be represented as:

[ExtensionSettings]

ActiveExtensions[]

ActiveExtensions[]=ini_1

ActiveExtensions[]=ini_2

As you know, configuration system will prepend ini_2 before ini_1. So, ini_1 configuration value can override the value from ini_2. When you want to read ‘CurrentActiveName’ in block ‘IniOrderTest’, you will get ‘ini_1′.

In conclusion, eZ Publish 4.4 has improved loading order of extension by introducing the ‘topology’. Keep in mind, the extension order is the reverse of the order of configuration list, since it uses prepending method when activates extensions.

In the web technical industry, the engineers are the crucial part for the domain, and the certified engineers become more and more important for a web construction company. Here we will introduce the main international web technical certifications; they represent a symbol of high level web engineer.

Zend PHP 5:

Becoming PHP certified is a measure of your experience in the world of PHP. The goal of the Zend PHP Certification program is to allow PHP professionals to attain the “Zend Certified Engineer” designation. This is identical in concept to other well know certification programs such as “Microsoft’s Certified Professionals (MCP)” and the “Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP)” programs. The Zend PHP Certification program aims at creating a measure of distinction that employers can use to evaluate prospective employees. Becoming a Zend Certified Engineer will help you to be a better programmer, and it will most likely improve the chances of your resume standing out from among other applicants vying for the same position.
The exam is created by an Advisory Board made up of thought leaders in the PHP community. Because the exam is created with specific skills, knowledge and competencies that are matched to real-world job functions, Zend Certifications provide a measure of technical distinction that employers use to evaluate prospective employees.

Flex certification:

An Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) is a person who has demonstrated a professional level in proficiency with one or more Adobe software products. To become an ACE, you must pass one or more product-specific proficiency exams and agree to the ACE terms and conditions.

Zend Framework certification:

The Zend Framework Certification is an industry-wide standard that recognizes the attainment of a professional level of expertise in using Zend Framework . This certification is also a measure of distinction that employers use to evaluate prospective employees.
The exam is created by an Advisory Board made up of thought leaders in the PHP community. Because the exam is created with specific skills, knowledge and competencies that are matched to real-world job functions, Zend Certifications provide a measure of technical distinction that employers use to evaluate prospective employees.

eZ Publish certification:

The eZ certification program expands the services offered by eZ Systems by providing a suite of exams that can be taken by individuals to verify their skills with various aspects of eZ Publish.

My SQL certification:

MySQL certification lays the foundation for becoming a trusted and valuable resource for your company and customers. MySQL certifications are available for Developers, DBAs and for those specializing in MySQL Cluster technologies.

Bysoft is very proud to announce that more than half of its engineers are certified in Bysoft key technologies, we have until now more than 20 Zend PHP 5 certified engineers, and 3 eZ Publish certified engineers and 1 for each of Flex certification, Zend Framework and My SQL certifications, only in month of August, we have 8 more new certified colleagues:

Zend PHP 5?Lincoln, Tony, Jachie, Dean, Mickael, Joshua
EZ Publish: Cavin
My SQL: Chad

With the talent and professional skill of our technical team, Bysoft’s products stand out in the market, and Bysoft grow strongly with the engineers’ growth. We realized the management, operations, and technology’s improvement finally achieved a higher service quality.