International 24-hour Programming Contest

Challenge24 as International 24-hour Programming Contest offers young and talented people the possibility to show and demonstrate their individual programming skills. They are asked to build teams each consisting of 3 persons in order to solve difficult and very demanding tasks and programming problems.

An exemplary task for the International 24-hour Programming Contest, which gets annually held in Hungary, would be the development of a specific extension for Magento. Magento represents an open source ecommerce web application which was officially released on March 31, 2008. Being created and developed by Varien Inc., Magento builds on components and functions of the so-called Zend Framework, an open source, object-orientated web application framework in PHP 5.

Magento offers a large number of functions such as Magento Connect and Site Management. Site Management means that Magento enables several independent stores to be easily managed on domains with self-contained catalogs as well as customer bases. Magento Connect, however, is an interface for both extensions and amendments of Magento’s standard functionality. Consequently Magento makes it possible to install a variety of modules through a web-based interface that is easily and without any difficulty accessible by means of the specific administration area of a Magento installation. Strictly speaking any community member of Magento is allowed to develop extensions and upload them through the respective website. In case of having difficulties considering the installation of any module, confirmed community members get supported by the installation wizard. Strictly speaking extensions and modules are installed by entering a specific module key into the web-based interface of Magento. By the way, the module key is available on the module page.

There are three main categories of extensions hosted on Magento Connect:

• Core Modules
• Commercial Modules
• Community Modules.

The development of a specific extension for Magento could be ordered by a Magento Agency, a so-called Magento Agentur in German, and realized by participants of the International 24-hour Programming Contest. If the Magento Agency is satisfied with the quality of the extension developed within the contest Challenge24, it is highly possible that the respective participants and developers get priced for their great work.

An exemplary task for such an extension for Magento would be the development of a module that allows customers to pay within a shop by means of their credit cards.