Earlier tonight I completed – and passed – the Magento Certification Test, thus becoming a certified Magento developer. I must say the test was not nearly as easy as I thought it would be. The questions are multiple choice but use checkboxes rather than radio buttons. Quite a few of the questions were either obscure, had an ambiguous question or answers or relied entirely on terminology which I wouldn’t consider to be standard in any way. Thankfully, it appears that if you have spent an unreasonable amount of time working on Magento code, as I have, then passing is not impossible. I’d be interested to know what other people thought of it!

I just updated the software running this blog – fairly trivial process, especially when you have the fallback of version control. Wordpress 2.7 is really exactly the same on the frontend but the admin panel has been changed significantly, and for the better I think. For instance, I am writing this directly from the dashboard, rather than going into a full post creation page. Highly recommended upgrade!

The first production version of Magento Commerce has been released. I’ll be checking through the new release later today to see if I have to make any changes to my modules – now that the software is stable I can be more confident about working on the Australian module and translation.

I have just finished upgrading the site to use the latest version of WordPress. Overall it was a pretty fast and painless upgrade. The new version most obviously (to me) brings a redesigned admin area and some extra convenience was managing a blog. A good upgrade and well worth the 5 minutes it took to install!

I have just finished adding a basic direct deposit payment module to my Australian Magento module. Development only took a day – again, because I didn’t understand some basic things to do with the Magento/Zend framework – and was mostly done by replicating functionality for the Check/Money Order module that’s already in Magento. Although direct deposit is currently lumped in with the rest of the Australian stuff I could always extract it if people in other countries would find it useful. I’m not sure how popular a payment method it is overseas.

The next order of business will be cleaning up the code for release and then moving on to the development of a BPAY payment method, which should be pretty similar to direct deposit.

Gary Gygax, creator of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, has passed away at the age of 69. I shall have to pull out some of my books tonight for a read in his honour.

Update: I don’t think I could possibly have put it better than how the guys at Penny Arcade have paid tribute.

Update 2: There’s a great obituary for Gygax over at Ars Technica. It’s amazing to think of the impact this man’s work has made on so many people in the world!