New Magento Forum - Achievements and Perspectives

Several months ago new Magento Forum was presented to the community. What are the perspectives of the new communication platform and how does it reflect the expectations of multiple users and developers?



To be honest, each of us was sure that the old forum could no longer exist as it was and needed some fundamental changes. And, most likely, the decision to replace it with something totally new was right in those circumstances. As most of the community, we believe that it was a great idea and today we enjoy the result.

The only controversial thing is the decision to irrevocably delete the old forum base. Heavily discussed this topic was closed with the consensus that it was a forced action, which actually had no alternatives due to the extremely spammy condition of the previous forum.

Getting down to the forum we’d like to start from the general impression created by its design and structure.

New Magento Forum Structure

The new design and structure are cleaner and simpler allowing even beginning users to instantly catch the main content and navigation elements.

Currently Magento forum is based on Lithium – the provider of social management software.

Made in official Magento colors within a two-column layout the  Magento forum has 5 main sections: Community, Core Technology, Extensions, General Discussions and International Communities.

The Community section is focused on Magento general and different questions starting from the forum itself to Magento security issues.



The Core Technology section covers the issues regarding Magento installations and updates, hosting, performance, themes, layout, design questions, configuration, etc.

Everything about Magento extensions, including installations, searches, and even the questions covering extensions building are contained in the Extensions section.



In the General Discussions section people share their ideas about Magento improvements, showcase their sites and ask for advices. This section also contains Small Business Merchant Chat, what sounds in unison with the latest Magento idea to “put the power of Magento in the hands of small business”.

At last, the International Communities embrace the local forum threads of most active Magento local communities in their native languages. Apart from traditional Magento countries like The United States, The United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, etc. we can also find the Chinese and Hebrew communities there, as well as some requests for Persian and Indonesian threads.

Currently Magento Forum counts 5.5K + posts.



The second half of the forum's main page contains the sections with posts and topics grouped by some other parameters, which allow users to easily search some specific items.

Latest Topics, Latest Posts, My Subscriptions, Unread Topics, and Active Areas – they all display the forum from different angles and are targeted to engage customers into more active interactions with the platform.

Useful Findings

Despite the main value of Magento Forum is in posts and provided expertise, usability is also very important for any website. The forum has some pleasant features, which make browsing convenient and easy:

• Hot and discussed topics are colored into red;

 

• The topics, where you post your answers are marked by arrows;

 

• All topics has their ratings and kudos;

 

• The forum has breadcrumbs for easy navigation;

 

• The right-hand sidebar contains Top Tags, Top Kudoed Posts, Top Kudoed Authors.

The backend functionality is also very powerful and includes numerous profile settings: personal information, email settings, avatars, display and layout preferences, subscription and notification setting, etc.

The Team

We clearly understand that the forum requires a lot of work and sincerely thank the team made this success possible, including the main persons of the project:

• Piotr Kaminski – Creator;

 

• Sherrie Rohde – Magento Forum Manager;

 

• Ben Marks – Magento Evangelist.

Conclusion

So, new Magento Forum seems to be a great beginning of new communications and new data bank for all Magento users. We also hope that this forum will have a long life and save a lot of useful knowledge about Magento and everything around it.

Add your comments below, please.