Integration with Slack is one of the key reasons why companies continue to migrate to the growing chat platform.   Recently Slack shared some metrics on their growth and it continues to be impressive with 8 million daily active users spanning 500,000 teams with 3 million paid users.

To date Slack has done the best job of promoting integration as a key differentiation in the platform and developers continue to release apps to help integrate Slack with many different platforms.

The competition is growing in the space with offerings from Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Atlassian looking to capitalize on the success of Slack.  These platforms have a varying degree of integration support and promotion of integration but all continue to iterate to bring more value to their chat platform.

One of the most common integrations for teams of all sizes is a connection with Agile development tools.  This suite of software solutions help teams running agile processes to spit projects into sprints and activities into tasks and sub-tasks.  Keeping everything organized is a key tenant to success in Agile development and a number of platforms exist to help the process.

A few of the most common platforms are Atlassian Jira, Trello and Asana.  Each has its own advantages and disadvantages and work best for teams based on their maturity and complexity.   In all cases however the integration with chat platforms is a critical aspect of keeping everything moving.

When chat platforms are integrated with development tools the process moves faster because everyone stays on the same page and users don’t have to constantly switch between apps losing precious time.

When looking for a slack jira integration there are a few options for teams to consider:

• Jira Cloud by Atlassian – this free plugin allows Jira Cloud customers to get ticket information when issues are mentioned.   It will find issues in chats and automatically expand information about the ticket.
  • Advantages: Free
  • Disadvantages:  Single Feature, Only available for Jira Cloud, Requires configuration for each channel.
• Jira Server Alerts – this plugin utilizes web hooks in Jira to push updates to channels when updates are made in Jira.
  • Advantages: Free, Available for Jira Cloud and Server
  • Disadvantages: Only pushes information from Jira to Slack – no other features
• Slack Jira Integration – This plugin also known as Jira Integration+ represents a premium alternative to free solutions.  It is targeted towards teams that want to do more with integration with Jira and comes packed with many more features then the free alternatives.
  • Advantages: Full integration with Create, Assign, Transition, Comment, Edit, Schedule, Log Work, Notifications, and more.
  • Disadvantages: Premium service at $0.50/user/month
• Jira Server Slack Integration – Teams running a self-hosted Jira Server solution should not feel left out when it comes to Slack integration.  This solution offers the same deep integration available for Jira Cloud teams and is compatible with Jira server versions released after 2016.
  • Advantages: Fully featured, Compatible with behind the firewall solutions
  • Disadvantages: Premium service

For teams using Trello the official integration between Slack and Trello is likely the best bet.

• Slack Trello Integration – this plugin offers a deep integration between Trello and Slack and mirrors many of the features that Jira Integration+ offers with it’s Slack to Jira integration.
  • Advantages:  Fully featured
  • Disadvantages: Utilizes a power-up which effects Trello pricing

If Asana is your Agile platform of choice the official offering also looks fully featured.

• Slack Asana Integration – Allows users to take action directly from Slack.  Users can creates issues, add comments, etc right from Slack.
  • Advantages:  Fully featured
  • Disadvantages: N/A

When looking at the options available for integration with Slack it is clear there are many good choices to keep your agile process moving.  All provides with fully featured solutions are touting the prevention of context switching and streamlining the process.   As hundreds of thousands of teams utilize these solutions and continue to write positive reviews it is clear that at least some of these promises are being delivered.

What do you think?  How does your team integrate your Agile tool with Slack? Any solutions missing from my list?

PS – For those looking for a Jira Stride Integration that works with Jira Cloud and Server check out Chat for Stride from Nextup.  It appears to be a fully featured integration and will likely gain some traction with Jira Server teams looking to migrate from HipChat to Stride.

I recently migrated from my 17″ MBP to the new retina macbook and noticed that the battery life was not what I was expecting. The retina macbook seemed to be running hot and that battery would drain far quicker than expected.

After a bit of Googling I found some discussions on the Apple forums around a hung “dock” process that can get left over after migration assistant runs. In my case I used a time machine backup to restore to the new Retina Mac so I decided to take a look.

I pulled up the activity monitor (global search for activity monitor) and sure enough I had a “dock” process running 100% of one of the cores. I took a look at my battery and had 75% power and 1:35 remaining (of course this is not what is expected with a new MBP).

If you see the same issue on your machine follow these steps to kill the dock process

1. Open terminal
2. Run the following commands (hit enter after each one)


cd ~/Library/Preferences/
rm com.apple.desktop.plist
killall Dock


The dock will disappear for a second and then come back and the process should be remove from your activity monitor. As soon as I ran the commands the system slowed down and the CPU usage went way down. As I type the battery says 64% and 3:12 hours – much more like it.

Hope this helps someone.

Hi everyone,

I had a request today to to add WYSIWYG support to the transactional emails section under “System” > “Transactional Emails”.

It appears that it is pretty simple.
1. Add the Fonits WYSIWYG Editor Extension (free) – http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/fontis-wysiwyg-editor.html
2. Add the transactional emails text editor Text Area CSS ID value in “System” > “Configuration” > “Admin” > WYSIWYG Editor – the value is template_text
3. Save the config

You should how have WYSIWYG editing ability in transactional emails.

NOTE: You can also watch this Video for this info – http://vimeo.com/4316043

Does it work for you?

Download this free extension from Magento Connect here:  Remove or Change States and Regions

This extension lets you hide certain states on the front end to prevent customers from selecting them during checkout, estimate shipping, payment, etc. One common issue that many users of Magento (Community and Enterprise) is the list of states (regions for non-US) displayed to customers during checkout, registration and estimate shipping. When Magento is first installed a number of items exist for the United States that are not commonly shipped to or need specific shipping rules.

States commonly excluded from Magento stores:

• Alaska
• American Samoa
• Federated States Of Micronesia
• Guam
• Hawaii
• Marshall Islands
• Northern Mariana Islands
• Palau
• Puerto Rico
• Virgin Islands

In the case of my medical supplies business we had flat rate shipping to the lower 48 states from our supplier and were charged very high rates to ship to Hawaii, Alaska and other US territories and military locations.  We wanted to handle shipments to these locations offline to ensure we did not lose our shirts on shipping.

One way to achieve this is to modify the collections.php file here (created local version):  /app/code/core/Mage/Directory/Model/Mysql4/Region/Collection.php to alter the regions array returned.  If you like getting into the code and want to redo this update when you upgrade Magento this might work well for you.

There is now a FREE way remove displayed options in shipping and billing in the administrative interface via a new extension.  The “Remove or Change States and Regions” extension is the first extension developed in a joint venture between my company and Eltrino consulting (a team of Magento Rockstars based in Keiv).

Video Demonstration

Instructions for use:

Here is how it works:

1. Download and install the extension from Magento Connect
2. Once installed a new menu item appears under “System” > “Configuration” > “Sales” with the title “Region Management”



3. After selecting “Region Management” the configuration screen is displayed.   Click “New Region Configuration” to add exclusions for a Country (multiple Countries can be configured by adding additional configurations.



4. Use the “Common Settings” select option to pre-select certain common settings or select specific values based on your needs.  The options here will be modified based on customer requests but to launch we will be providing the following options for the United States:
   • Lower 48 States – Excludes military locations, US territories and Alaska and Hawaii
   • 50 States Only – Excludes military locations and US territories
5. Save your updates and clear the Magento Cache (System > Cache Management > Flush Magento Cache).
6. Check your customer website and the excluded options will be removed.

The extension effects the system in the following ways:

• Excluded States or Regions are removed from all Store Views and Websites
• Excluded areas are not displayed as options for billing address, shipping address, estimate shipping and customer registration.

For customers who want further flexibility we are going to offer an enhanced version which allows these values to be specified by store/website and for each area (IE – allow Hawaii for registration but not for shipping address).   Please contact me if you are interested in this enhanced version and would like to give input on features and functions.

Download this free extension from Magento Connect here:  Remove or Change States and Regions

The extension is compatible with Community 1.4 – 1.6 and is currently under review for a Trusted Extension for MagentoGo.  The extension is also upgrade proof and will be modified if needed for future Magento versions.

Please let me know what you think in the comments area below.   If you have ideas for additional extensions you would like to see from the NjcMedia & Eltrino partnership please let me know.  We have around 40 extensions in mind which are all coming soon…

Hi everyone,

One of my major Magento Enterprise customers just launched the onestepcheckout extsion – http://www.onestepcheckout.com as an A/B test with the existing multi-step checkout process. We are using Google Website Optimizer to test the variations and I will have some data starting today.

I will update this post with results of the test. I know others have experienced a lift with this extension and I am excited to see how it works for us.

Here is a quick post found on the keynote site on how to remove keynote sessions from Google Analytics. We recently added GA to the Ford site I run and wanted to exclude our monitoring visits to get real results.

Just implemented as suggested in this post: http://blogs.keynote.com/the_watch/2011/09/filtering-out-web-performance-monitoring-traffic-from-google-analytics.html

As the post notes it does not apply to historic traffic so I guess I have to wait until tomorrow to see if it really works.

Thanks Keynote!

Check out this nice 960 pixel grid system. A great tool for designing websites that are proportional and look great.

http://960.gs/

I ran into an issue this week where I switched on SSL on a development site and then realized the SSL cert was not installed correctly. This is a big issue in Magento because there is no way to get back to the admin to switch it back off.

If this ever happens do the following to switch back:

1. Open up your admin panel (cPanel or other)
2. Go to phpMyAdmin (if MySql)
3. Find your Magento Database
4. Find table “core_config_data”
5. Look for the columns “web/secure/use_in_frontend” and “web/secure/use_in_adminhtml”
6. Edit both values, make them equal to “0”

After this is done you will be back in action.

The new Ford Motor Company Accessories website is now launched on Magento Enterprise.

Go buy something!

Ford Accessories
Lincoln Accessories
Mercury Accessories

Promotional content in order confirmation, shipping notice, etc emails are common in eCommerce – here is a tiny code snippet to make this possible in Magento (Community or Enterprise). I recently added this to the Enterprise implementation for my current customer and everything appears to be working without issue.

1. Add reference to CMS block in transactional email template

 {{block type="cms/block" block_id="ford-order-confirmation-promotions" }}

2. Create CMS block, make sure identifier of block matches.
3. Test your email

Simple right? This could be taken a step further with a little code to select a CMS block based on certain conditions (customer type, purchase history, etc). Anyone want to share that code?