Ultimento 1.5 release notes

Tags: new release, roadmap

May 19, 2011

The highly anticipated Ultimento 1.5 is here!! I’m really excited about this new release – as always we’ve included tons of new features and major improvements, as well as more improvements to the code and further optimization for maximum speed, SEO, and conversions. Here are the highlights for this new major release:

Three awesome new Magento Extensions!

Every new Ultimento release adds new Magento modules to the incredible list of Magento themes and Magento extensions that are built-in Ultimento. This time we’re proud to announce the release of 3 new Magento extensions:

1. Newsletter Opt-in Magento extension

Email marketing works. With the Newsletter Checkout Magento extension you can now dramatically increase newsletter subscription rates by including a signup for the newsletter check-box right on the Magento onepage checkout!

Here’s what it looks like on the frontend:

And here are the admin options:

Just to be clear – the Newsletter Checkout Magento extension is included for FREE with Ultimento 1.5. Enjoy!

2. Disable admin notifications

With the release of Ultimento 1.5, we decided to also release a small free extension that may just make your life a little easier. If you’re like most Magento store owners, or if you’re building an e-commerce site on Magento, you probably spend a lot of time in the Magento admin. And if you’re like me, you’re probably tired of all these popup notifications that show up when you login to your admin! Especially when they’re promotional notices that may be irrelevant for you.

With this Magento extension, you can now easily disable these notifications in your Magento admin. You can choose to disable popup windows only, or just the status bar – or both. It’s finally up to you .

Go get the Disable Admin Notification Free Magento extension.

Customize Ultimento while keeping your installation upgrade-proof

We’re introducing a very easy way to customize Ultimento without affecting future upgrade-ability. That means that you can now safely customize all aspects of Ultimento’s template and skin files in Magento, and still be able to update your installation when we release new versions without overwriting your custom changes!

Stay unique but still reap the benefits of our continuous hard work!

Three new options in the Magento admin!

The more you can manage and customize your Magento store directly from the admin panel – the easier it is for you. We know that. The challenge is to reach optimum results in terms of keeping the settings as simple as possible, while providing handy admin options and keeping the Magento themes lightening fast. Speeding up Magento is our top priority, along with SEO, conversions, and usability. But Ultimento’s ease of use for the Magento store owner is also what draws so many people to us. Ultimento’s award winning auto-installer certainly plays a big part in that but we wanted to improve in other areas as well:

1. Display product names on grid view

You asked for it – we delivered! You can now enable or disable displaying product names on the grid view directly from your Magento admin. As before product names will still display by default on the Popup Preview images but now you can also display them under the product thumbnails in the catalog grid view. All you have to do is enable them in the Magento admin under Ultimento’s settings:

2. Enable/disable social bookmarking

When done right, social bookmarking can improve traffic, sales, SEO and even conversions. When done wrong, adding social bookmarking options to your product pages will slow them down, decrease conversions (by adding distractions), and raise your hosting costs (by adding unnecessary load on the server from irrelevant traffic).

We know conversions and we know load speed. That’s why when we introduced social bookmarking options in Ultimento  (email, Facebook, and Twitter) we made sure to not lose track of the true objective of e-commerce: sales! So we coded the social bookmarking features ourselves from scratch for optimum load speed and SEO. We also came up with a non-intrusive design that performed best in terms of conversions when tested against dozens of other variations.

Now you can choose to enable or disable these options individually, directly from your Magento admin!

3. Enable URL shortening service (tinyurl)

With the rise of Twitter, URL shorteners have become extremely popular. If your product names and URLs are long, it might be beneficial to enable the new URL shortening option we’ve added to this Ultimento release.

Keep in mind however that enabling this option may have a small impact on the load speed of your product pages (since the page will request a shortened URL from the tinyurl.com API which means your store will be dependent on the responsiveness of their server). There is no way around this so it’s up to you to choose whether or not you want to enable this new option!

Improved checkout page design!

A small change in the Magento theme onepage checkout design, a HUGE change in conversions. With the new design, and combined with the included Optimized Checkout extension and Newsletter Opt-in extension, Ultimento will bring your store to levels of conversion rates you never knew were possible!

Even easier installation!

Everybody loves the Ultimento 1-click auto-install feature. In a single click, you get the Ultimento themes installed with their myriad of pages and pre-loaded data to get you going as quickly as possible. Ultimento installer now also takes care of disabling, flushing, and re-enabling the Magento cache for you! In a word, here’s what the Ultimento installer does for you:

1. Disables Magento cache
2. Installs Ultimento’s 15 built-in premium Magento extensions
3. Creates all Ultimento pages with their dummy content (without ever overwriting anything on your Magento store)
4. Creates all Ultimento’s static blocks and their dummy content (again the installer will never overwrite or delete existing static blocks in your Magento installation)
5. Goes through your Magento configuration and tweaks it on the storeview level for optimum performance in terms of load speed and SEO
6. Flushes Magento cache and re-enables it

I’ll update the installation instructions shortly .

Better mobile support!

Ultimento’s Magento themes will work on all browsers, including mobile browsers. And now we’ve also added alternative content for users who use Ultimento’s Flash slider! Many mobile browsers don’t support Flash (including the iPhone, iPad, etc) and search engine crawlers can’t read Flash either. That’s why it’s important to integrate alternative content that will load instead of the Flash on browsers that don’t support Flash, and will be read by search engine bots.

Of course the JavaScript slider is always an option and most people use it instead, but just in case you’re a fan of those Flash effects – now Ultimento’s got your covered in terms of better SEO and mobile device compatibility.

How to update your store to Ultimento 1.5

That’s easy. Here’s how to download the latest Ultimento version and here’s how to update your installation .

4 Comments

1. Jason says:

   May 31, 2011 at 2:17 pm

   Display product names on grid view – when enabled, how do you get the gray image where the text overlays to follow the text. If the name of a product is long, it flows right over the shopping cart, view image bar and it becomes an offset.

   For the social bookmarking network options, does it put the social icons in the detail views or view pages? Or is this not the same as the twitter, facebook, email buttons?

   Thnxs.

   Reply
   • noam says:

     May 31, 2011 at 11:40 pm

     Hi Jason – the background should stretch automatically and the product name shouldn’t overlap with anything, no matter how long it is. Are you sure you’re using the latest Ultimento CSS? That’s the only thing I can think of so make sure to follow the update instructions carefully .
2. bob garrett says:

   June 2, 2011 at 12:14 pm

   I manage the Magento Experts group on Linkedin with about 800 members
   http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Magento-Ecommerce-75041?mostPopular=&gid=75041

   Does your solution work with Magento GO?
   also I have a pretty large network (300,000) twitter followers
   would you have an interest in my promotional efforts
   in exchange for a free membership?

   Reply
   • noam says:

     June 3, 2011 at 10:59 am

     Hi Bob – thanks for the interest! I just sent you an email .