If you affiliate yourself with Magento world, you, for sure, have heard that Magento Connect has been replaced by Magento Marketplace, which was introduced almost 2 years ago and has recently (Sep 2017) become the official Magento-sanctioned repository of extensions.

Magento Connect was a directory for Magento extensions. Many of them were free.

Forms are essential for lead generation. In fact, they're essential for most of the customer acquisition efforts. It's pretty obvious and doesn't require that much explaining. You have newsletters, you have mailing lists for specific offers, etc. And for most of these people signed up through a form, in one way or another. 

And that's why it's unfortunate that Magento, by default, doesn't have that much functionality when it comes to creating custom forms for your users. Be that a pop up form on your blog or a sign up form in a sidebar - there isn't much you can do to make it work. That's even more true, if you're not a tech person. 

Fortunately, there are tons of great Magento extensions that can help you create amazing forms for your promotions, deals and other lead generation efforts. We wanted to highlight and review some of the most popular Magento form builders that can work for any type of Magento store and eCommerce niche. 

This week we've seen some great Magento themes pop up and we wanted to share them with you. We take this stuff very serious and that's why we only share products that we find really interesting, unique and usable. The themes that we showcase today have a friendly interface, lots of functionality and follow the latest design trends.

A new theme might give a great boost for your online business, as it offers more functionality, including mobile friendly user interface and more convenient customization options. With the current selection of online themes you don't have to spend a fortune on re-designing your website. 

This week we're not going to wrap things up with the usual update about new Magento extensions. Instead, we wanted to share a list of the most popular Magento extension downloads from Magento Connect within the last 6 months.

For this list we used publicly available info from the marketplace: popularity score, Highest Rated page and the publication dates for various extensions. Check it out and let us know, if you're using any of these products. We hope that some of you will also be able to find new and useful tools that can optimize your online business even further.

This week Magento Connect introduced some great extensions that will allow you to diversify your content management practices, increase the security of your backend and boost your offline sales with a store locating extension.

And our usual disclaimer: these are new extensions, added to Magento Connect just this week. Some of their functions may not work properly. You can always turn to the developers for more custom and direct assistance. All of the contact details are available in the marketplace.

There are thousands of extension at Magento Connect. Your job is to create a practical product that’s easy to implement, use and update. It’s doesn’t matter, if you are rookie developer, submitting your first extension to the marketplace, or a seasoned extensions provider that has been in the business for years. If you’re not making it easy to adopt and use your product - none of your skills and enthusiastic ideas will matter. 

Your Magento Connect listing is your ‘first impression’, as many people go straight to the marketplace to look for the right extension for their store. Your presentation and the information that you provide on your extension’s Magento Connect page is important for business. Think of it as a landing page that tries to convert people. 

And don’t think that if you have a unique solution - you don’t have to worry about anything. Even the best ideas, if explained and presented improperly, may never really take off. Especially, if you’re providing a new extension that has never been introduced before - your job is to make it clear, why the extension is so great and why people should install it.

In this post we’re sharing some tips and tricks, which might help you make your extension more appealing and bring in more installs for your product. We’ll offer some examples of good and bad Magento Connect product pages. Please note, that these examples do not actually represent the quality of the displayed products. They merely reflect the quality of the product page and its presentation. 

This weeks extensions are all about sales and the checkout process. Learn how to offer better deals and optimize your coupon/ discount practices with these useful and simple extensions.

This week we're highlighting latest Magento Connect extensions that will help you increase your conversions and simplify your work with product categories on your website. 

Remember that these extensions are raw and have just been added to the marketplace. It's up to you to give them a try and see for yourself, if any of them actually work for your particular store. 

This week there were some pretty good extensions added to the Magento Connect marketplace. Again, these are all new, so it’s up to you to test them out and see, if they work for your store’s setup. Don’t forget to check out last weeks edition, where we talked about mCommerce, social marketing and BitCoin. 

Featured extensions that we chose to highlight this week will change the way you serve your customers, boost your SEO, add new payment options and offer better ways to communicate with clients.