Inchoo's Magento Posts: Boost The Speed of Your Magento

September 8th, 2009
Published by: inchoo
Inchoo's Magento Posts

You're reading the 200th blog post edition of Inchoo's Magento e-book. It collects all of our blog posts on Magento. We want to thank everyone for staying with us so far and hope we will live to see 1000th blog post anniversary. :) Inchoo is an ecommerce design and development company specialized in building Magento online stores.
Boost the speed of your Magento

One of the drawbacks of Magento is currently its speed if default configuration is used. There are certain ways of making it run faster. The best one is to enable GZip compression by changing .htaccess file a little. You just need to uncomment part of the code. In my case, the speed increase was exactly 235%.
Add custom structural block / reference in Magento | Inchoo

If you already performed some Magento research, you will know that it is built on a fully modular model that gives great scalability and flexibility for your store. While creating a theme, you are provided with many content blocks that you can place in structural blocks. If you are not sure what they are, please read Designers Guide to Magento first. Magento provides few structural blocks by default and many content blocks. This article tells what needs to be in place to create new structural block.
Step 1: Name the structural block

Open the file layout/page.xml in your active theme folder. Inside you will find lines like:
<block type="core/text_list" name="left" as="left"/> <block type="core/text_list" name="content" as="content"/> <block type="core/text_list" name="right" as="right"/>
What are structural blocks?

They are the parent blocks of content blocks and serve to position its content blocks within a store page context. Take a look at the image below. These structural blocks exist in the forms of the header area, left column area, right columnetc. which serve to create the visual structure for a store page. Our goal is to create a new structural block called newreference.
Lets mimic this and add a new line somewhere inside the same block tag.
<block type="core/text_list" name="newreference" as="newrefe
Good. Now we told Magento that new structural block exists with the name newreference. Magento still doesnt know what to do with it.
Step 2: Tell Magento where to place it

We now need to point Magento where it should output this new structural block. Lets go to template/page folder in our active theme folder. You will notice different layouts there. Lets assume we want the new structural block to appear only on pages that use 2-column layout with right sidebar. In that case we should open 2columns-right.phtml file.
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September 8th, 2009
TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_datetime`; Lets assume we wish the newreference block to be placed TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_decimal`; below 2 columns, but above the footer. In this case, our TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_int`; updated file could look like this: TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_text`; TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_varchar`;  TRUNCATE `sales_order_int`; <div class="middle-container"> TRUNCATE `sales_order_text`; <div class="middle col-2-right-layout">< ?php getChildHtml('breadcrumbs') ?> TRUNCATE `sales_order_varchar`;  TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote`; <div id="main" class="col-main"> TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote_address`; < ?php getChildHtml('global_messages') ?> TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote_address_item`;  TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote_item`;  TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote_item_option`; < ?php getChildHtml('content') ?> TRUNCATE `sales_flat_order_item`; </div> TRUNCATE `sendfriend_log`;  TRUNCATE `tag`; TRUNCATE `tag_relation`;  TRUNCATE `tag_summary`; <div class="col-right side-col">< ?php getChildHtml('right') ?></div> TRUNCATE `wishlist`; </div> TRUNCATE `log_quote`; <div>< ?php getChildHtml('newreference') ?></div> TRUNCATE `report_event`; </div>  ALTER TABLE `sales_order` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_datetime` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; Step 3: Populating structural block ALTER TABLE `sales_order_decimal` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; We have the block properly placed, but unfortunately nothing ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_datetime` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; is new on the frontsite. Lets populate the new block with ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_decimal` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; something. We will put new products block there as an ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_int` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_text` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; example. Go to appropriate layout XML file and add this block ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_varchar` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; to appropriate place. ALTER TABLE `sales_order_int` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_text` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; <reference name="newreference"> <block type="catalog/product_new" name="home.product.new" ALTER TABLE `sales_order_varchar` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; template="catalog/product/new.phtml" /> ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; </reference> ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote_address` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote_address_item` AUTO_INCREMENT=1 Thats it. I hope it will help someone ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote_item` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote_item_option` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; There are 15 comments ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_order_item` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sendfriend_log` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `tag` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `tag_relation` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `tag_summary` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `wishlist` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `log_quote` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; You got a Magento project to develop, you created a Magento ALTER TABLE `report_event` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;
How to delete orders in Magento? | Inchoo
theme, you placed initial products and categories and you also placed some test orders to see if Shipping and Payment methods work as expected. Everything seems to be cool and the client wishes to launch the site. You launch it. When you enter the administration for the first time after the launch, you will see all your test orders there. You know those should be deleted. But how?
If you try to delete orders in the backend, you will find out that you can only set the status to cancelled and the order is still there. Unfortunately, Magento doesnt enable us to delete those via administration, so you will not see any Delete order button. This can be quite frustrating both to developers and the merchants. People coming from an SAP world find the inability to delete to have some merit but there should be a status that removes the sales count from the reports i.e. sales, inventory, etc.
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0; TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE `sales_order`; `sales_order_datetime`; `sales_order_decimal`; `sales_order_entity`;
-- reset TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE TRUNCATE ALTER ALTER ALTER ALTER ALTER ALTER ALTER ALTER
customers `customer_address_entity`; `customer_address_entity_datetime`; `customer_address_entity_decimal`; `customer_address_entity_int`; `customer_address_entity_text`; `customer_address_entity_varchar`; `customer_entity`; `customer_entity_datetime`; `customer_entity_decimal`; `customer_entity_int`; `customer_entity_text`; `customer_entity_varchar`; `log_customer`; `log_visitor`; `log_visitor_info`;
TABLE TABLE TABLE TABLE TABLE TABLE TABLE TABLE
`customer_address_entity` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; `customer_address_entity_datetime` AUTO_INCREMEN `customer_address_entity_decimal` AUTO_INCREMENT `customer_address_entity_int` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; `customer_address_entity_text` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; `customer_address_entity_varchar` AUTO_INCREMENT `customer_entity` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; `customer_entity_datetime` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;
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September 8th, 2009

ALTER ALTER ALTER ALTER ALTER ALTER ALTER TABLE TABLE TABLE TABLE TABLE TABLE TABLE `customer_entity_decimal` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; `customer_entity_int` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; `customer_entity_text` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; `customer_entity_varchar` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; `log_customer` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; `log_visitor` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; `log_visitor_info` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ?>
-- Reset all ID counters TRUNCATE èav_entity_store`; ALTER TABLE èav_entity_store` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1;
< ?php if (!empty($result)): ?> <table id="relatedProductsList"> < ?php foreach ($result as $item): ?> <tr class="productInfo"> <td><a href="<?php echo $storeUrl ?>/< ?php echo $item->url_ <td>< ?php _e('Starting at') ?> $ < ?php echo floatval($item </tr> < ?php endforeach; ?> </table> < ?php endif; ?>
After you have it executed, the test orders will not be in the database any more. Keep in mind that this will delete ALL orders, in the database. So, you should execute this queries immediately after launch.
Hope some of you find this useful. Especially those who refuse to use Web Services for connecting different systems. Download connect2MAGE WordPress plugin.
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connect2MAGE | WordPress plugin for easy Magento database connection

Hi everyone. I wrote this little plugin while working on one of our projects. If you know your way around WordPress then you know what $wpdb variable stands for. Imagine the following scenario. You have WordPress installation on one database, Magento on another. You know your way around SQL. You can always make new object based on WPDB class inside your template files giving it database access parameters, or you can use this plugin and use $MAGEDB the same way you use $wpdb. Below is a little example of using $MAGEDB to connect to Magento database and retrieve some products by reading ids from custom field of some post inside your WordPress. Place this code inside one of your templates, like single.php.
< ?php global $MAGEDB; $MAGEDB->show_errors(true); /** BASIC SETUP */ //$storeUrl = 'http://server/shop/index.php/'; $storeUrl = get_option('connect2MAGE_StoreUrl'); //$urlExt = '.html'; $urlExt = get_option('connect2MAGE_UrlExt'); /** END OF BASIC SETUP */
Custom checkout cart - How to send email after successful checkout in Magento | Inchoo
Recently I have been working on a custom checkout page for one of our clients in Sweden. I had some trouble figuring out how to send default Magento order email with all of the order info. After an hour or so of studying Magento core code, here is the solution on how to send email after successful order has been made. Not sure how useful this alone will be for you, so Ill throw a little advice along the way. When trying to figure how to reuse Magento code, separate some time to study the Model classes with more detail. Then tapping into and reusing some of them should be far more easier.
Latest News RSS box in Magento using Zend_Feed_Rss | Inchoo

You would like to have a eCommerce power of Magento, but also have a blog to empower your business? In this case, you probably know that Magento doesnt have some article manager in the box. Many clients seek for supplementary solution like Wordpress to accomplish this goal. Ok, so you created a blog on same or different domain and you would like those articles to appear somewhere in Magento (probably sidebar). This article will explain how to do it.
Lets create a file called latest_news.phtml in app/design/frontend/default/[your_theme]/template/ callouts/latest_news.phtml $result = array(); Now we will create a PHP block that will display the list if(!empty($entityIds)) of articles from RSS feed. We will use Inchoo RSS for { demonstration purposes. In your scenario, replace it with your $entityIds = $entityIds[0]; $sql = "SELECT è`.*, `_table_price`.`value` AS `price`, own valid RSS URL. IFNULL(_table_visibility.value, _table_visibility_default.va
$entityIds = get_post_custom_values(get_option('connect2MAGE_CustomFieldName')); $result = $MAGEDB->get_results($sql); var_dump($result); }
< ?php $channel = new Zend_Feed_Rss('http://feeds.feedburner
<div class="block block-latest-news"> <div class="block-title"> else <h2>< ?php echo $this->__('Latest News') ?></h2> { </div> echo '<p class="relatedProductInfo">No related products available...</p>'; <div class="block-content"> }
September 8th, 2009
<ol id="graybox-latest-news"> use the http://somestore.domain/catalogsearch/ < ?php foreach ($channel as $item): ?> partnumber as a link <li><a href="<?php echo $item->link; ?>">< ?php echo $item->title; ?></a></li> < ?php endforeach; ?> show only custom_partnumber field on the search form </ol> </div> First, we have to see where does the /advanced come from. </div>
Lets open our template folder at
Step 2 Now, we should decide where to place it. I assume you already know how Magento blocks and references work. Lets assume you would like to place it in right column by default for whole catalog. In this case open your app/design/frontend/default/ [your_theme]/layout/catalog.xml file and under default tag update right reference with something similar. Thats it. You should be able to see the list of articles from RSS feed with the URLs. Hope this will help someone.
app\design\frontend\default\default\template \catalogsearch\ there you will see the /advanced folder. Make a copy of that entire folder, in the same location, and name it to something like /custom. Now your /custom folder should have 2 files: form.phtml and result.phtml. Next in line is the /layout folder in our template. You need to open catalogsearch.xml file. Go to line 64. Do you see the <catalogsearch_advanced_index> tag there. Make the copy of it (including all of the content it hold with the closing tag also). Put the copy of that entire small chunk of code right below. Now rename all of the occurrences of advanced to custom there like on code below: <catalogsearch_custom_index> <! Mage_Catalogsearch > <reference name=root> <action method=setTemplate><template>page/2columnsright.phtml</template></action> </reference> <reference name=head> <action method=addItem><type>js_css</ type><name>calendar/calendar-win2k-1.css</ name><params/><!<if/ ><condition>can_load_calendar_js</condition>></ action> <action method=addItem><type>js</ type><name>calendar/calendar.js</name><!<params/ ><if/><condition>can_load_calendar_js</condition> ></action> <action method=addItem><type>js</ type><name>calendar/lang/calendar-en.js</name><! <params/><if/><condition>can_load_calendar_js</ condition>></action> <action method=addItem><type>js</ type><name>calendar/calendar-setup.js</name><! <params/><if/><condition>can_load_calendar_js</ condition>></action> </reference> <reference name=content>
Advanced search in Magento and how to use it in your own way

Its been a while since my last post. Ive been working on Magento quite actively last two months. I noticed this negative trend in my blogging; more I know about Magento, the less I write about it. Some things just look so easy now, and they start to feel like something I should not write about. Anyhow. time to share some wisdom with community Our current client uses somewhat specific (dont they all) store set. When I say specific, i dont imply anything bad about it. One of the stand up features at this clients site is the advanced search functionality. One of the coolest features of the built in advanced search is the possibility to search based on attributes assigned to a product. To do the search by attributes, your attributes must have that option turned on when created (or later, when editing an attribute). In our case we had a client that wanted something like http://somestore.domain/catalogsearch/partnumber or http://somestore.domain/catalogsearch/brand instead of the default one http://somestore.domain/catalogsearch/advanced with all of the searchable fields on form. Some of you might say why not use the default and call it a day. Well, default one does not get very user friendly when large number of custom added searchable attributes are added in Magento admin interface. Then the frontend search form gets cluttered and users are easily to get confused. So in our example we would like to use the advanced search and all of its behaviour and logic but to use it on somewhat special link and to hide unnecessary fields. Therefore, our custom pages he would have only one input field on form and the submit button. How do we set this up? Well, all of the logic and functionality is already there. What we need is to:
September 8th, 2009
<block type=catalogsearch/custom_form name=catalogsearch_custom_form template=catalogsearch/custom/form.phtml/> </reference> </catalogsearch_custom_index> Do the same for <catalogsearch_advanced_result> tag. Now go to the app\code\core\Mage\CatalogSearch\Block folder. And make a copy of /Advanced folder naming it /Custom. Open /Custom/Form.php and replace class name Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Advanced_Form with Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Custom_Form, then open /Custom/Result.php and replace class name Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Advanced_Result with Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Custom_Result. Inside Form.php there is getModel() function. DO NOT replace the Mage::getSingleton(catalogsearch/advanced); with Mage::getSingleton(catalogsearch/custom);. The point is to use the default advanced search logic here. Same goes for getSearchModel() function inside Result.php file. Next in line, controllers. We need to make the copy of AdvancedController.php and name it CustomController.php, then open it and replace the class name Mage_CatalogSearch_AdvancedController with Mage_CatalogSearch_CustomController. Inside this CustomController.php there is a function called resultAction(). You need to replace the ( Mage::getSingleton(catalogsearch/advanced) ) string catalogsearch/advanced with catalogsearch/custom. This is the one telling the browser what page to open. Now if you open your url link in browser with /index.php/ catalogsearch/custom instead of /index.php/catalogsearch/ advanced you will see the same form there. And for the final task As we said at the start, the point of all this is to 1) get more custom link in url and 2) display only one custom searchable attribute field in form. Therefore, for the last step we need to go to the template\catalogsearch\custom folder and open form.phtml file. Inside that file, there is one foreach loop that goes like <?php foreach ($this->getSearchableAttributes() $_attribute): ?> as
This might not be the best method of reusing already written code, however I hope its any eye opener to somewhat more elegant aproach. Enyoj.
Related products
There are three types of product relations in Magento: Up-sells, Related Products, and Cross-sell Products. When viewing a product, Upsells for this product are items that your customers would ideally buy instead of the product theyre viewing. They might be better quality, produce a higher profit margin, be more popular, etc. These appear on the product info page. Related products appear in the product info page as well, in the right column. Related products are meant to be purchased in addition to the item the customer is viewing. Finally, Cross-sell items appear in the shopping cart. When a customer navigates to the shopping cart (this can happen automatically after adding a product, or not), the cross-sells block displays a selection of items marked as cross-sells to the items already in the cart. Theyre a bit like impulse buys like magazines and candy at the cash registers in grocery stores.
Upsells
This is the example of the Up-sell. Ideally, the visitor is supposed to analyze those products as they should be relevant to the one that is just loaded.
All we need to do now is to place one if() condition right below it. If your custom attribute name (code) is my_custom_attribute then your if() condition might look something like <?php foreach ($this->getSearchableAttributes() $_attribute): ?> <?php if($_code == my_custom_attribute): ?> <?php endif; ?> <?php endforeach; ?> And you are done. Now you have somewhat more custom url, and only one custom field displayed on that url. as
File upload in Magento

Now, Magento already have frontend and admin part of file upload option implemented in themes. Since backend part is still missing, understand that this still doesnt work, however, if youre interested how it looks, read on .. We are coding module of similar functionality for one of our clients as we speak, but we have our fingers crossed to see this option in next Magento version!
September 8th, 2009
Inchoo TV Magento channel
Making use of Magento getSingleton method

In one of my previous articles I showed you how to use getModel and getData methods in Magento. Although we should not put those to methods at the same level, since Id say the getModel is a bit more higher. Higher in sense, you first use the geModel to create the instance of object then you use getData to retrieve the data from that instance. I have said it before, and Im saying it again; Magento is a great peace of full OOP power of PHP. Its architecture is something not yet widely seen in CMS solutions. One of the architectural goodies of Magento is its Singleton design pattern. In short, Singleton design pattern ensures a class has only one instance. Therefore one should provide a global point of access to that single instance of a class. So why would you want to limit yourself to only one instance? Lets say you have an application that utilizes database connection. Why would you create multiple instance of the same database connection object? What if you had references to an object in multiple places in your application? Wouldnt you like to avoid the overhead of creating a new instance of that object for each reference? Then there is the case where you might want to pass the objects state from one reference to another rather than always starting from an initial state. Inside the Mage.php file of Magento system there is a getSingleton method (function if you prefer). Since its footprint is rather small, Ill copy paste the code for you to see it. First, notice the word static. In PHP and in other OOP languages keyword static stands for something like this can be called on non objects, directly from class. Now let me show you the footprint of the getModel method. Do you notice the parameters inside the brackets? They are the same for both of theme. Where am I getting with this? Well, I already showed you how to figure out the list of all of the available parameters in one of my previous articles on my site. So all we need to do at this point is, play with those parameters using getSingleton() method and observe the results. Most important thing you need to remember is that using getSingleton you are calling already instantiated object. So if you get the empty array as a result, it means the object is empty. Only the blueprint is there, but nothing is loaded in it. We had the similar case using getModel(catalog/product) on some pages. If we done var_dump or print_r we could saw the return array was empty. Then we had to use the load method to load some data into our newly instantiated object. What Im trying to say, you need to play with it to get the feeling. Some models will return data rich objects some will return empty arrays. If we were to do
Mage::getSingleton(catalog/session) on view.phtml file we would retrieve an array with some useful data in it. Do not get confused with me mentioning the view.phmtl file, its just he file i like to use to test the code. Using Mage::getSingleton(core/session) would retrieve us some more data. You get the picture. Test, test, test Whats great about the whole thing is that naming in Magento is perfectly logical so most of the time you will probably find stuff you need in few minutes or so.
Figuring out Magento object context

One of the problems working under the hood of the Magento CMS is determining the context of $this. If you are about to do any advanced stuff with your template, besides layout changes, you need to get familiar with Magentos objects (classes). Lets have a look at the /app/design/frontend/default/ default/template/catalog/product/view.phtml file. If you open this file and execute var_dump($this) your browser will return empty page after a short period of delay. By page I mean on the product view page; the one you see when you click on Magetno product. Experienced users will open PHP error log and notice the error message caused by var_dump(). Error message: PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 121374721 bytes) I like using print_r() and var_dump(), mostly because so far I had no positive experience using fancy debug or any other debugger with systems like Magento. Why is PHP throwing errors then? If you google out the error PHP has thrown at you, youll see that PHP 5.2 has memory limit. Follow the link http://www.php.net/ manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.memory-limit to see how and what exactly. Google search gave me some useful results trying to solve my problems. I found Krumo at http://krumo.sourceforge.net/. Its a PHP debugging tool, replacement for print_r() and var_dump(). After setting up Krumo and running it on Magento it gave me exactly what I wanted. It gave me the object type of the dumped file; in this case it gave me object type of $this. If youre using an IDE studio with code completion support like NuSphere PhpED, ZendStudio or NetBeans and you decide to do something like $this-> you wont get any methods listed. I havent yet seen the IDE that can perform this kind of smart logic and figure out the context of $this by it self. What you can do is use the information obtained by krumo::dump($this). Performing krumo::dump($this) on /app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/ product/view.phtml file will return object type, Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_View. Now if you do Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_View:: your IDE supporting code completion will give you a drop down of all the available methods, lets say canEmailToFriend();
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Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_View::canEmailToFriend(); Now all you need to do is to replace Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_View with $this like $this->canEmailToFriend(); And youre done. All of this may look like why do I need this. What you need it a smart IDE, one that can figure out the context of $this by it self and call the methods accordingly. No IDE currently does that, if Im not missing on something. For now I see no better solution to retrieve the object context of $this across all those Magento files. If you need some help setting up Krumo with Magento you can read my other, somewhat detailed article on activecodeline.com. Hope this was useful for you.
What is Best Value filed?

When you go to Category page in Magento administration, you will see Category Products tab. From there, you will see the list of products that are associated to this category. The last column in Position. That is how Best Value is determined. So, best value is not something that is dynamically calculated. You can tailor it to your likings.
Get product review info (independent) of review page

Here at Inchoo, we are working on a private project, that should see daylight any time soon. One of the requirements we had is to show product review info on pages independent of product review page. Lets say you wish to show review info on home page for some of the products. After few weeks with working with Magento, one learns how to use the model stuff directly from view files. Although this might not be the right way, its most definitely the fastest way (and I doubt most of your clients would prefer any other , especially if its some minor modification).
How to change default Sort Order

The file you need to look at is: /app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/ Block/Product/List/Toolbar.php Since well modify it, make a copy to /app/code/local/Mage/Catalog/Block/Product/List/ Toolbar.php One there, you will notice this code at the beginning of the file:
$this->_availableOrder = array( 'position' => $this->__('Best Value'), 'name' => $this->__('Name'), 'price' => $this->__('Price') );
Simple random banner rotator in Magento using static blocks

This is my first post here and Ill write about my first challenge regarding Magento since I came to work at Inchoo. Please note that you are not restricted only to images, you could use text, video or whatever you want here, but Ill focus on images with links as title says. In order to show this block, you should be familiar with Magento layouts. Since that is out of scope for this article, Ill show you how to put it below the content on cms pages.
Default order takes the first value available. So, all you have to do is to either: reorder it if you want to have a selection in the Toolbar or set only one value of choice if you will remove the selection from the toolbar I hope this will help somebody.

Couple of days ago we launched a new Magento project: Pebblehill Designs. This site utilizes Magento features and turns it into a very powerful online catalog. You wont notice the Shopping Cart or checkout process yet. Even without those, this site shows exactly what Pebblehill has to offer: the most popular styles of custom upholstered furniture. You can customize the furniture collection to express your own unique style made with the highest quality materials and craftsmanship available. Pebble Hill Designs parsons chairs are American made with pride in Georgia. The quality speaks for itself. Your products are pre-assembled and ready for use when you receive them.
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Changing default category sort order in Magento

Category toolbar has many options. By default is shows how many items are in the category, you can choose how many products you wish to be displayed per page, you can change the listing type (List or Grid) and you may choose Sort Order. This Sort Order can be confusing. The default Sort Order is Best Value. What does it mean? How is the Best value determined? Can we change the default sort order?
September 8th, 2009
The love and the passion for beautiful home interiors translates into a high-quality product with a sophisticated style manufactured in the USA. Pebblehill Designs has assembled some of the most popular styles of custom upholstered furniture to offer to our customers. All styles are available in every fabric shown or you can provide your own fabric. You can customize the furniture collection to express your own unique style made with the highest quality materials and craftsmanship available.
Magento part of the site can be viewed if you click at Shop by Vehicle or Shop by Brand tabs from the main menu, but you will notice that some blocks seamlessly integrate between two solutions.
We developed this site as the Surgeworks team. The design was created by one of out top designers, Rafael Torales. We hope you enjoy it and feel free to post your comments.
The Best Shopping Cart :: Trend analysis of osCommerce, Magento, ZenCart and CRE Loaded | Inchoo TeraFlex PLUS, another Magento + Wordpress duo
After we launched TeraFlex Suspensions website few months ago, we created a new similar website for Teraflex PLUS. Although the name is similar, this is not the same company. The primary goal of this site is to help Jeep owners to upgrade their pets with parts and accessories for any type of adventure. The secondary goal is to create a Jeep enthusiast community in Utah, USA and surroundings. The site is powered by Wordpress and Magento combination. Magento is a superb Shopping Cart, but it lacks some of the CMS features. Wordpress is a superb CMS, but it fails to provide the needs for the eCommerce goals. The combination of these can create a very powerful website. We present you TeraFlex PLUS : Jeep Adventure Outfitters http://www.teraflexplus.com/ As you can see, osCommerce still remains the most popular eCommerce platform. However, you can notice that this
If you try to ask this question on some forum or newsgroup, you will surely get many replies. Everyone will present you his favorite. My first developed online store was created with standard osCommerce platform. After three or four projects, I started to work with CRE Loaded and used it frequently for years. Although it was also an osCommerce fork, it had many advantages. I switched to Magento early this year and this is my final choice. Google Trends is a great tool to check some platforms popularity by comparing it to the competition. For my short analysis, I compared:
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popularity is fading. ZenCart is stable for the past two years. And my previous favorite, CRE Loaded (much better solution than ZenCart in my opinion), is very low. Its popularity is also fading even after their team put great effort into a new website and identity. Now, take a look at blue line. My prediction is that sometime in Q1 2009, Magento will become most popular eCommerce platform. It will surely kick osCommerce off the throne where that fat duck was sitting for many years. It was about time. First of all, let me inform you that this article is for those of you who are just starting with Magento. If you are a Magento expert, you will probably know this. Consider it just a reminder for those who use Magento for first time. There are three common mistakes that most people do when they try to use Magento for first time, so read this article and you wont be one of them.:) More experienced PHP developers will first read Magento Designers Guide before they try to style Magento, but others wont and thats the mistake number two. Since Magento has great theme fallback system there is really no need to touch default theme. Although easiest way to make new theme for new Magento is top copy the whole theme to a new folder, dont do that. Copy only the files you will need: from / design/frontend/default/default/ directory to /design/ frontend/default/YOUR_NEW_THEME directory. Do the same thing with /skin/frontend/default/default/ Congratulations, you have your own theme just like that. All that left is to apply new theme (System>Configuration->Design) and you are ready to do with your theme files whatever you want. Third mistake is modifying Magento core files. What files are core ones? All what is in app/code/core folder. If you have a need to modify some of those ones, you just need to duplicate that file in the same directory path to app/ code/local. For example, if you need to modify the file app/code/core/Mage/Checkout/Block/Success.php copy it to app/code/local/Mage/Checkout/Block/Success.php and leave the core file intact. This way your Magento will be more bullet-proof to future updates.
also tutorial about this on Magento Wiki. However i dont like approach of duplicating and overriding Mage files from /local, if it can be avoided, so i decided to write this small and useful example of adding or overriding default Magento settings through separated config files. And yes, Magento values can be overridden this way. Default layouts config can be found in app/code/core/Mage/Cms/etc/config.xml along with used xml code structure, so check it out. Thank you for listening!
Drupal to Magento integration, simple link tweak with multilingual site

I see my coworker and friend eljko Pra made a nice little post on Adding a new language in Magento so I figure Ill jump with a little Drupal to Magento integration trick concerning link issues and multilingual sites. Here is a piece of code you can use in your Drupal templates to do the proper switching from Drupal site to Magento while keeping the selected language of site. Note, this tweak assumes you have the desired language setup on both Drupal and Magento side. This part goes to some of your Drupal theme file
... global $language ; $lname = ($language->language == null) ? 'en' : $language->l $storeView = null; if($lname == 'de') { $storeView = '?___store=german& ??>
</p><p style="text-align: left;"><a id="main_menu_shop" href ...
Note the $storeView variable; GET ___store holds the value of code name of the view you assigned in Magento, while GET ___from_store variable is used as helper to Magento inner workings. You can basically omit the other one. Your links to Shop from Drupal to Magento should now activate the proper language, the same one you have active on Drupal side.
Adding a new language in Magento

As anything in Magento adding a new language is something that requires a certain procedure which we will explain right now and for future reference. 3. Now go to: Configuration -> Current Configuration Scope (Select your language from the dropdown) and on the right side under Locale options choose the desired language. Thats it, now when you go to the frontend of the site, youll notice a dropdown menu allowing the language switching.
Custom CMS page layout in Magento | Inchoo

Last week I had a request to add new custom layout for few cms pages in one Magento shop. Its really useful for different static pages of your shop. First create extension with only config file in it: app/code/local/Inchoo/ AdditionalCmsPageLayouts/etc/config.xml Add your page/custom-static-page-1.phtml template file (or copy some default one for start) and youre done There is
Access denied in Magento admin

Some of you may encountered this problem. You install new Magento extension through downloader, try to access its configuration settings and Magento throws Access denied page at you. Although youre administrator of the system.
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If you worked with osCommerce, Zen Cart, CRE Loaded or any similar eCommerce platform before, you might find Magento database structure quite confusing when you see it for the first time. I advise you not to rush too much figuring out what is what by glancing through database. Try to spend first few hours getting familiar with some background. For purposes of flexibility, the Magento database heavily utilizes an EntityAttribute-Value (EAV) data model. As is often the case, the cost of flexibility is complexity. Is there something in Magento that is simple from developers point of view? Data manipulation in Magento is often more knowledge demanding than that typical use of traditional relational tables. Therefore, an understanding of EAV principles and how they have been modeled into Magento it is HIGHLY recommended before making changes to the Magento data or the Magento schema (Wikipedia: Entity-attributevalue_model). Varien has simplified the identification of EAV related tables with consistent naming conventions. Core EAV tables are prefixed with EAV_. Diagrams in this post contain a section labeled EAV which displays Magentos core EAV tables and thier relationships to non-EAV tables.
So what happened here? Magento just doesnt have stored privileges for this new extension. First just try to logout and login again. If that doesnt work, you need to reset admin privileges. Navigate to System->Permissions->Roles Administrators role. and click
Check your Role Resources settings just in case, Resource Access dropdown should be already set to All for administrators.
Database diagrams and documents found in this post are intended to mirror the database schema as defined by Varien. Table relationships depicted in the diagrams represent only those relationships explicitly defined as Foreign Keys in the Magento database. Additional informal/undiagrammed table relationships may also exist, so when modifying the schema or directly manipulating data it is important to identify and evaluate possible changes to these tables as well (and the tables they relate to, and the tables they relate to). The author of Database Diagram is Gordon Goodwin, IT Consultant. You can see his info in the PDF.
Magento + .Net Framework, simple order preview app

Without changing anything just click Save Role button, so that Magento re-saves all permissions. You should be able to access your new extension now without problems. For those of you who are into kinky stuff I made a simple, more of a proof of concept, application that sits in Widnows taskbar and shows the order info in balloon popup. Took me little more than half of hour to get this working. Almost forgot how great C# is
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Magento has this great feature, rss feed for orders. You can access it via link http://myshopsite/rss/order/new. It requires authentication, so you need to provide Magento user and pass to access this link. Idea I wanted to play around was how to get this info in my windows app. Its really, really simple. Below is the screenshot of this little app for you to see what Im talking about.
And here is the application it self simpleorderpreview and full source code (Visual Studio 2008 Express C#, entire solution project) acmnewproducts. When you un-archive files from simpleorderpreview there is only one thing you need to do prior to running .exe file. You need to open ACMNewProducts.exe.config and set username, password and url of your own Magento shop. Thats it. Now you can run the app. One click on Magento icon inside the taskbar executes show order process, while double cliking the icon closes the application. I will not go into the details in this post on how this works. Basicaly its simple XML parser. Most important part is the HTTP authentification, which you can see in code source code. Hope you find this usefull, something to play with.
Technically, we create a simple products and after that a grouped products. When we edit the grouped product, we will associate simple products to it.It works very fine, but some of you might have issue if a simple product has custom options. If thats the case, and if costum options are set as required (default way), the simple product will not be associative to the grouped product. Lets see what needs to be changed in that case. On Magento site, there is a nice tutorial how to create a grouped product. Please read it first to become familiar with the process. If you dont have to assign simple products with custom options to a grouped product, that tutorial will be enough.
Associate simple product with custom options in grouped product in Magento | Inchoo
Does the title sound complicated? Grouped Products display several products on one page. For example if youre selling chefs knives and you have the same knife in four sizes, you can make a grouped product to display all four sizes. Customers can select the size(s) they want and add to cart from this page. Another example would be a themed bedroom set you can create a grouped product and sell the sheets, comforter, and pillow cases all from the same page.
Manually create Google Sitemap in Magento | Inchoo

Most of you probably know this, but lets define what the sitemaps are. Sitemaps are a simple way for site creators to give search engines the information about pages on their site that are available for public. Basically, those are just 1 or more XML files that lists URLs for a site along with additional meta informatio about each URL (like last update, how often it changes, its importance relevant to other pages). With this in mind, search engines can be more clever while crawling the site. Click here see how sitemap of this site looks like. You will hear the term Google Sitemap a lot, but XML Schema for the Sitemap protocol is not related only to Google at all. It can be used in many places, but the most important ones are Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer.
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How do we create Google Sitemap in Magento?

1. Sitemap File Configuration
First we need to create sitemap file in Magento. This is basically pointer to tell Magento where to create sitemap file and how to name it. Log in to Magento Administration and go to: Catalog -> Google Sitemap Check to see if the sitemap file is already present. Lets assume we wish to create sitemap in the URL: http:// www.yourstore.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml To do it successfully, 1. FTP to the server 2. create sitemap folder 3. chmod the folder to 777 On some servers, previous steps will not be required, but it is better to create the file first so that Magento can edit it. Lets go to Magento administration now and click on Add Sitemap button. Just insert the default values. After this step, we just told Magento where to create sitemap file. It is not yet created.
One of the things that caught my eye and made me wonder about the consequences is the Observer and override functionality that probably most of the serious custom made Magento modules will utilize. Utilizing Observers enables you to observe and execute some action inside the customer work flow or even some admin stuff. Such functionality is heavily known is systems like WordPress and its called hooks. Besides hooking, another useful an very powerful feature which is actually related more to the OOP concept itself is the overriding. Personally i find the combination of observers and overrides to be the coolest and most powerful stuff in Magento module development. So where is the issue? As of time of this writing, the latest Magento version is 1.3.1. Lets look at the previous major release prior to that one, version 1.2.1.2. Here is a prepareForCart method signature from app/code/core/ Mage/Catalog/Model/Product/Type/Abstract.php (line 239, Magento version 1.2.1.2): Notice the difference? Although this might not look like that big of a deal suppose you had implemented override functionality like In the above code, we override the prepareForCart method to to some custom stuff for us. This peace of code would work perfectly fine in version 1.2.1.2, but when client decides to upgrade the shop to 1.3.1 or newer he would get the error like To me, stuff like this is a serious downside towards building advanced modules. Changing core files and core functionality can have serious impact on custom made modules each Magento upgrade. Therefore, one should keep an eye open on what modules he will throw into the shop. Personally I consider online stores very serious and have strong feelings about each store owner having somewhat of dedicated developer that will be in charge even for stuff like adding new modules. Just consider the financial loss for a store owner of any more serious web shop if he decides to download the and install module himself just to realize that for incompatibility reasons this new module made his shop fully nonfunctional.
2. Configure Sitemap
Sitemap can be configured from the interface System -> Configuration -> Catalog->Google Sitemap. If you are not sure what does it all mean, check XML Tag definitions section from Sitemaps XML format document.
3. Create Sitemap Manually

Looks like Magento folks were thinking that sitemap should only be created by a cron job. Yes, it can be done that way also. Be sure to read Wiki article How to Set Up a Cron Job to get familiar with it. If you are looking for manual creation, quit your search for Create Sitemap button. You will not find it. But there is a workaround. You can enter manual URL to execute sitemap creation: http://www.yourstore.com/index.php/admin/sitemap/ generate/sitemap_id/[ID of Sitemap from step 1] Of course, replace the content with square brackets with actual Sitemap ID.
How to transfer large Magento database from live to development server and other way round
I have been involved in Magento development for almost a year now. God knows I had (and still have) my moments of pain with it . If you are in professional, everyday, PHP development that focuses mainly on Magento then your life probably isnt all flowers and bees. Magento is extremely rich eCommerce platform, but its main downside IMHO is its size and code complexity. If you download Magento via SVN, you will sound find out it has around 11 600 and more files. This is no small figure. Transferring that much of files over the FTP can be a real night mare. Luckily we have SSH and tar command to handle this really neat. But what about database. Today I worked on database with more than 20 000 products in store and with extremely large number of categories. What seemed like easy database
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Observer pitfalls of building serious modules in Magento

Unlike good old WordPress that every kid in the block knows how to create a plugin for, Magento is a whole new system. It requires extensive knowledge of OOP, ORMs, MVC, and few other stuff. This is why not every kid in the block can write a module for Magento, and this is why I love it. However, unlike WordPress, Drupal and other community driven systems out there who keep in mind backward compatibility things with Magento things are a bit different.
September 8th, 2009
transfer from live site to local developer machine to do a test and fix on few issues tunerd out to be an issue for itself. Without further delay, here is my favorite tool to handle all database related work from now on: Navicat. Among my favorite features is the Data transfer. Directly moving one database to another among different MySQL servers works like a charm. I find yourself strangled among often database recommended action I suggests you test the trial version of this tool. Here are some screenshots of Navicat Data transfer in Action.
Affiliates for all, are modules I consider loosely related to core. They are in one or another way connected to Magento but they are self standing, independent, applications. Installation of Affiliate module is a trivial task. It mostly comes down to extracting downloaded archive file to a web accessible directory (to your server, hosting) and configuring the config.inc file. (For security reasons, try renaming the config.inc to config.inc.php, plus changing the /lib/ bootstrap.php on line 23 to include config.inc.php). After importing affiliates.sql into the database our installation is done. To configure Magento part, one needs to copy required files form /carts directory of Affiliate module and then (turn off Cache) go to System > Configuration and set the required options. After that you can go back to your Affiliate For All application, upload some banners and set their url links to point to your Magento shop. When you test banner the links (click on one of them to get you to Magento store, then Magento store url should have a little GET variable in url like ?ref=someNum). Now when you do the entire checkout process, order info gets recorded to Affiliate For All application. If you wish to play with Affiliate For All without installing it, you can check out the demo (just use Admin both for user and password).
New Magento theme tutorial | Inchoo

There are many new Magento stores that are published each day. If you are with Magento for a longer time, you will also notice that many of those look similar to default or modern Magento theme. Creating an totally unique and custom one can be a difficult process, easpecially taking into consideration number of different interfaces we have. This is why many Magento developers choose to use the CSS from one of mendioned Magento themes that come with default installation and style those up. This is not a bad choice at all as it speeds up the process and those default themes are very good. But, for those of you who wish to make an extra effort, we suggest that you to take a look at Magento Blank Theme for a head start. Before you get to this point, be sure to read Magento Designers Guide, where the Magento design terminology is explained in this PDF document. Blank Theme is a sample skeleton theme for Magento designer and a perfect way to start a new one. Lets be honest, we will rarely want to develop a totally new layout. We wish the header on the top, footer on the bottom. We wish to have 1, 2 or 3 columns, we wish to have boxes. Blank Theme does just that: provides a layout, but without any heavy styling. This makes it excellent base ground for a new Magento project. It doesnt come with default installation, so you will have to use Magento Connect to get it. http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/518/blanktheme
Affiliates for all Magento integration

Recently one of our clients needed and info on Affiliate module for Magento. When it comes to Magento, word module is loosely related. Sure, every module needs config files in order to report its connection to Magento core. Modules like this,
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Magento community member Ross gave a good review comment: This is a great theme to use for wire-framing or as a base for developing a custom theme! It looks like a lot of work has gone in to slimming down the HTML and CSS, which makes it much easier to work with compared to the default theme. I particularly appreciate the well structured and commented CSS. The only things I would want different at this stage is for the callouts to be taken out (and removal of associated media images), and for this theme to be included in the main Magento download (I would even like it to be the default). 5 stars from me! Take a sneak peak of how does product info page looks line with no styling, but in finished layout. Im sure that the CSS wizards will find this invaluable.
Create a Color Switcher in Magento

Magento comes packed with a lot of options. But no matter how many options you put into some product you can never cover all of them. One of such options (for now) is a color switcher in Magento. To be more precise, an image switcher based on color selection. Recently Ive made a screencast on my site on this subject, with somewhat different title. The idea is to have a dropdown box from which you choose a color and based on the color selection product image changes. All of this is to be based on some simple javascript (in my case, jQuery). Before we continue, you might want to see color switcher in action. We used this solution on our Kapitol Reef project. First you need to upload some images to your product and give them some meaningful names like Red, Blue, Green depending on your product color. When I say give them name, I mean on label values. Same goes for creating custom attribute. You create a dropdown selection box and create the same amount of dropdown options as you have images, giving them the same name Red, Green, Blue and so on. Here are some images for you to see what Im talking about:
Magento product view page analysis | Inchoo

One of the most edited file in Magento is the template file View.phtml file. Reason for this is that a lot of clients would like to rearrange it differently on their online stores. Here is the analysis of that file and the list of all the methods it uses. One thing to keep in mind, this document shows you the View.phtml block file and shows you its inherited methods. All of the Magento block files have the similar inheritance principle. Therefore to find out the available methods all you need to do is open up the extended (inherited) classes. If you are using some smart IDE solution like NetBeans 6.5 with PHP code completion support, you can simply do the Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_View-> and press the Ctrl + Space to get the dropdown list of all the available methods. If thats not the case, then you will how to do the things the manual way.
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After this is done we go to the code part. There are three things you need to do here. Upload the jQuery and save it into the /js/jquery/jquery.js. One important note on jQuery; for some reason I had to use jQuery 1.2.3 to get this example working. Latest version 1.2.6 (as of time of this writing) did not work. You can see the exact error it gave me on my screencast. Now you need to modify /template/page/html/head.phtml file to include the jQuery script (or any other if you can code the same logic into it) and write down few lines of JS to do the switching (you can download my version of file here head.phtml) And finaly, you need to modify the /template/catalog/ product/view/media.phtml file to grab all of the product images and dump them into some div. Here is my sample (media.phtml) so just copy paste the code. And some additional screenshots for you to see final result
After some additional styling you can get some impressive results for this. Hope you find it useful. You can see complete screencast at: http://activecodeline.com/wp-content/uploads/videos/ MagentoProductColorChooser.swf
Magentos Onepage Checkout in a nutshell

For the last two days Ive been working on a custom checkout page for one of our clients. Basicaly a page can be shown in Magento using simple Core_Template type. Basically all code is set inside the .phtml file so it can be shown on every possible page or block, meaning its object independent, no inheritance. Something you can call from with your layout files like To complete my work, I had two mayor requirements. One was to manage my way around programmable adding a simple products to cart, plus their quantity and other was to do checkout with items in cart. Checkout was to be made with predefined payment method as well as shipping method. After reviewing a lot of Magentos code involved in checkout process and process of adding products to cart and so on Ive put together what I see as the most short example one can use to do a checkout with such predefined conditions. If you have such special requirements for your site below is the code that you can place on whatever file you wish and include it yout tempalte as block type core/template. Where ubmitCustomCheckout is the name of the submit button or submit input field. To extract addresses you can use something like
Magento official documentation download

We were among a few of the studios to receive the early release of the Magento documentation before its official release date. We broke the embargo cause we just didnt have the heart to keep it to our selves, we all now how painful it is to work without it.
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Designer's Guide to Magento PDF download | Inchoo

After many developed CRE Loadeds online stores and watching Magento development progress for quite some time, I decided it was time to use Magento with my next client. My starting point for development was official Designers guide. Im the type of guy who likes to have documents nice&clean, so I tried to print it but print was a mess. Thats when I decided to create PDF of the official documentation for easy print. This is probably the best starting tutorial for creating a fresh new Magento template. I plan to write a short related tutorials in the days of 1st Magento development project, so I invite you to subscribe to RSS if you wish to be posted.
Magento Installation with SVN or Wget Unix command | Inchoo

Those of you who know what SVN is, feel free to skip this article. Those of you who are not familiar with SVN, this is a must-read. If you use standard FTP to upload all Magento files, you may find this process very time consuming. Magento 1.1.8 has over 6.700 files in over 2.200 folders. FTPing can sometimes take few hours on some servers. Lets look at alternatives. Both alternatives require SSH access to the server. Im aware that some low quality webhosting providers do not provide you with SSH info immediately. If you dont have SSH info, ask webhosting support. If they dont give it to you, change webhosting provider. Make it a rule, youll make your life much easier. Get yourself familiar with basic UNIX commands first.
Custom admin theme in Magento

As mentioned on Magento forums the easiest way to achieve this is with overriding adminhtml config with your local custom one and activate it as module. This is just a small example of different approach with Admin Theme config option in admin panel, to show you how things can be done in different ways in Magento. Follow directory structure, copy files to their place and you will notice new Admin Theme option in System->Configuration>General->Design (Default Config scope). Your theme goes in app/design/adminhtml/default/yourthemename folder. It doesnt need to be whole theme of course, just the files youre changing.
Alternative 1: SVN
In the Downloads tab on Magento website, you will notice SVN page link: http://www.magentocommerce.com/svn You can see how short this page is. You have 2 commands you can run at SVN. You can chack latest work in progress or you can checkout latest stable version. If you are starting to develop a real project, you will probably want a stable version. Lets look at the original command: svn checkout http://svn.magentocommerce.com/ source/branches/1.1 This is probably not the exact command you wish to run on the server. It will place the files in trunk folder. I will assume two things: 1. You will want the clean code 2. You will want to specify the folder where you wish Magento to be installed If those are correct assumptions, you will want to run a command similar to this one: svn export --force http:// svn.magentocommerce.com/source/branches/1.1 shop svn This is the command export - The difference with checkout is that with an export, you get a clean copy of the code, and none of the subversion metadata, so it cant be used to svn up or make further changes. force you will overwrite all of the folders and files if they exist http://svn.magentocommerce.com/source/ branches/1.1 - this is SVN URL. Leave it intact.
Disabling wishlist functionality

If like many of the Magento store owners you find that some of the built-in features are not useful to you or to your customers you can always disable them via the admin interface buy disabling their respective modules. Wishlist is not one of them. To remove all of the traces of the wishlist functionality you need to do the following: 1. Go to the Admin interface (select the appropriate scope) and under System -> Configuration -> Customers -> Whishlist select No under the Enabled in the General options. This will remove all of the whishlist links in the magento blocks as well as the whishlist itself. 2. Just to make things perfect you should check the (yourskinname)/template/catalog/product/view/ addto.phtml and remove the pipe character from that file so that it doesnt disturb the looks of your site 3. Finally, since you do not need Whishlist anymore it is wise to disable its respective module output thru the admin interface (Go to: System -> Configuration ->Advanced->Advanced and set disable Mage_Whishlist ) Thats it. Your whish is Magentos command.
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shop - the name of the folder you wish to place the files into. You may set the folders name to your likings. Read more about SVN at Wikipedia SVN Page and Subversion official site.
After youre done with setting your new templates save the configuration by clicking on the Save config. Thats it. Wise thing to do now would be to check how the emails look when received so make a test purchase to verify everything is the way it should be.
Alternative 2: Installing via wget

I will not be very descriptive here. This alternative is very well explained on Magento website in Wiki section: http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/groups/227/ installing_magento_via_shell_ssh Both scenarios will only place files. You still need to run web based installer afterward. But, that is another story.
Bestseller products in Magento

Bestseller or best selling product is one of the features people tend to ask for when it comes to Magento. There are multiple ways to implement this feature. In this example, Im not using controller or model directories at all; Im going to show you how to implement this feature using only one file: the View. Basically, what you need to do is to create the directory inside your template directory and place the bestseller.phtml file in it. In my example, Im using the custom-created directory / inchoo. All of the screenshots provided here are based on that directory structure. Adding this feature to your store is a matter of two simple steps: copy bestseller-phtml file to your directory display the block on home page To add a block to a home page, you simply log into the Magento, CMS > Manage Pages > Home. Then add the following to the content area: {{block type=core/template bestseller.phtml}} template=inchoo/
Custom Transactional Emails

Since transactional emails are very important for the process of online shopping you need to have them set up just the you want them and the default templates just dont cut it. You need your own logo, email data and custom verbiage to be consistent with the image of your company. Here how its done : 1. Creating custom transactional e-mails via Admin a) In the admin panel of your magento installation go to: System->Transactional Emails Youll be presented with a list of default emails. Youll need to create a custom email so the only way to avoid writing our custom templates from scratch is to use the existing code of the template. Hint: If you want to see the template before copying, first click on the Preview button on the right. b) To create the new template click on the Add new template above the Transactional Emails list. This is the part where Magento helps you with the option to load a deafult template for you to customize. Nice feature indeed. Once you have loaded the deafult template give it a unique name under the Template name input field by adding a prefix of your own but leaving the deafult name as well. Example: mysite :: New account . That way you can easily spot them in the long list of default and custom emails. Afterwards you can easily customize the verbiage and styling within the Template subject and Template content. The Template content is the body of the message that the user will recieve upon transaction so be sure to change the Email, name of the company etc. Youll need to upload the logo of your company in the images folder of the skin youre using. Once you are done with editing, save the changes and repeat the process for the rest of the email templates. 2. Assigning the templates to different stores and storeviews Assigning is the easiest part. Just go to the System > Configuration > Sales > Sales Emails and select the corresponding template minding the configuration scope.
Notice the type attribute. I used core/template which means you can place this code anywhere in your site and it will work. Code does not inherit any collection objects from controllers since it has none. All that is necessary for the bestseller.phtml to work is defined in that single file.
One more thing: If you study the code in bestseller.phtml file you will see, at the very top of the file, the part that says: $this>show_total.
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If I were to write {{block type=core/template template=inchoo/bestseller.phtml}} show_total=12
Support for Downloadable Products. (to see this new product type in action visit the Magento Demo Store. We added an example of an MP3 product and an eBook ) Added Layered Navigation to site search result page, with control on the attribute level to include or exclude attributes used on the search results page. Improved site search to utilize MySQL fulltext search Added support for fixed-taxes on product level for such taxes as State Environmental Fee in the USA and WEEE/DEEE in the EU. Upgraded Zend Framework to the latest stable version 1.7.2 Added a Layered Navigation Cache for improved performance of large catalogs (currently in beta and is NOT recommended for production use). If you need to upgrade existing Magento version through the Magento Connect Manager to 1.2.0.1, follow this steps:
in my home page, then $this would be assigned property show_total with a value of 12.
Therefore, the provided bestseller.phtml file provides the option of setting the number of products you wish to see listed. Here is the bestseller.phtml packed in bestseller.zip. Hope you find this useful.
Do NOT use your live or production site. We suggest making a copy of your site and upgrading that copy first. Backup your index.php and .htaccess files (if modified) Log into your Magento Connect Manager. Select the Setting tab. Change the Preferred State to Stable, and save settings. For the Mage_All_Latest package select upgrade. Click on the Commit Changes button. The upgrade should start. After upgrade is complete click on the Refresh button. Copy your original index.php and .htaccess files back (if needed) Log into your admin and rebuild search index You should now have Magento 1.2.0 installed. Happy Magentizing
Magento 1.2. is out with downloadable products | Inchoo

Just at the dawn of 2008, Varien launched a new version of Magento: 1.2. Upgrading previous Magento versions was sometimes not an easy task since Varien used to change standard function names which caused themes to break. We backup the site, made a copy, took a deep breath, expected the worse, and Nothing The upgrade went smoothly. Wow, that felt good. We were joking at the company today. Zeljko: You know whats easy in Magento? Branko: There is nothing easy in Magento! Zeljko is an front end interface developer, while Branko is a programmer. Although creating Magento theme is a clear process if you follow designers guide, programming is much more complex. Before this version, Magento upgrades used to cause troubles. Hope this is over. There is always a good practice NOT to update platform to latest version immediately. Even in this case this proved to be valid. Two days after version 1.2. came version 1.2.0.1. that fixed some flaws. Keep this in mind when you wish to upgrade to newest version of the platform immediately after it appears. New version sorts some issues from Magento 1.1.x versions and brings some highly requested features such as:
Listing out products on sale in Magento | Inchoo

One of my recent articles was on the subject of sorting On Sale product in Magento. The following is a cleaner and more advanced look at howwith few tricks and smart movesyou can reuse existing Magento code and modify it to suit your needs. Product can be on sale in two ways: 1. when an item has a special price assigned to it on the individual level, or 2. when a special promotion covers the item It is important to remember that you dont have to set up the special price on each product to get it to be on sale; you can
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simply create a promotion rule and say something like Set all the products in Category X to be on sale. I provided few screenshots at the bottom of this article to provide a closer look at what Im talking about. I will not go into too much details here since this is a bit more advanced HOW TO, but here is the process in a nutshell: First, create a copy of /catalog/product/list.phtml file and name it onsale_list.phtml. Here is my version of onsale_list.phtml file. Second, activate this new file. There are few ways you can do this. Lets say you wish to assign this onsale_list.phtml on one of our categories, named On Sale, for instance. We then go to Categories > Manage Categories > On Sale select Custom design and under Custom layout update, place the following: product_list_toolbar If you now go to your category On Sale, it should only show products you have assigned to category On sale that have a special price set to them. If you now wish to apply Promotion rules to entire On sale category, then you simply assign a rule to one item, and all the items assigned to the same On sale category (covered by promotion rules) will be automatically listed in the grid. Basically, the magic is in one simple IF statement < ?php if(($_product->special_price !== null) or ($_product>_rule_price !== null)): ?> for each block that lists products. Check out the screenshots, they explain a lot.
Hope you find a way to try this out. Feel free to provide some feedback or additional suggestions.
Magento
After many weeks of work, our 1st Magento project hit the Web: TeraFlex Suspensions. As the purpose of the site
September 8th, 2009
in not primarily selling, but also branding and community development, we decided to use Wordpress and Magento combination to accomplish the clients goals.
I know that this is not some breakthrough article, but I will certanly create contact CMS page on all of my future Magento projects. The Magento portion is visible at http://www.teraflex.biz/ products/. We created an original and custom theme from scratch since we did not want it to look like the default one or to have a feel similar to the default one. It was not an easy task as the learning curve for Magento template system is quite steep compared to other solutions. However, it is worth the time. We added featured products to products page, the lightbox to products info page, and numerous styles that made this store quite unique.
Custom price filter in Magento

Quite a few people have asked me for a price filter functionality that comes with Magento. Mostly, the questions are same: How does one put the price filter anywhere on the page? How does one set its on price ranges in that filter? What defines default price ranges. Is it possible to set price filter for all my products instead of just single category? Lot of questions. The answer might be simpler then you might think. There are two ways to approach this problem. Head trough wall or stop and think approach.Default Magento price filter works with algoritam which functions on the following logic 1. Find the lowest and highest price in the range of filtered products. 2. Find what power of 10 these are in. 3. If theres 2 or less ranges available we go one power down. So one approach would to be to somehow override default price filter logic by rewriting it and embedding some new logic of yours. I call this one head trough wall. Im not implying that this is wrong approach, on the contrary this is the generic solution. However it does require some more time to come up with. Second solution is by far more easier. It involves using simple HTML (could use it in your static blocks). If one wishes to use the price range filter to filter trough entire product collection he can simply create a subcategory under the Default root category and add all of the products to it. Then we write some static html code with urls made to fire up the price filter. Lets look at the default Magento sample data. It gies you the following category layout Root Catalog (6) Furniture (6) Living Room (4)
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Wordpress
All the menu elements outside Products tab are run by Wordpress. We have stuff like: All of these elements turn Wordpress into a feature-rich CMS suitable for larger projects. How do you like the new site? Feel free to post a comment.
Place Contact form in CMS Page in Magento | Inchoo

As you know, Magento has a built-in contact form that can be used for general contacts. That form isnt part of any CMS page, you cannot edit some introduction text, you cannot add phone numbers administration, and you cannot see the breadcrumbs. If you wish to edit text in that default contact form, you will need to update front-end files. Luckily, there is an alternative. If you are a developer, editing your contact form HTML is an easy task. You only need to open file: app/design/frontend/default/[yourtheme]/template/ contacts/form.phtml and you will find your way around. However, there are cases when you would like to give your client an option to edit some intro text, edit his phone numbers, edit text behind the form, etc. You are probably guessing that it would be nice to be able to embed contact form in some CMS page. No problem.
September 8th, 2009
Bed Room (4) Notice the url link above It wont work if you put it like http:// somesite.domain/furniture/living-room/?price=1%2C199 It wont work like that because by default you do not have price filter functionality covering second subcategory level. What this means is that following link wont work http://somesite.domain/furniture/living-room/? price=1%2C199 Since the first subcategory level is Furniture, and second are Living Room and Bed Room, by default the following url will work with or withoutindex.php. url: price=1%2C199 http://somesite.domain/furniture/?
Most of this is quite selfexplanaory so, for those who need this kind of functionality across some special pages, hope you integrate it withouth any problems.
Magentique - Magento Showcase Launched | Inchoo

We launched one internal project today: magentique.com. For the last few months we were working almost exlusively on Magento projects. As many of you, we were also wondering what sites are developed with it. There are very little galleries that give the list of Magento powered stores and thats how this idea was created. We present you Magentique and hope you like it. Curiosity about this project is that we used Magento to develop it. Youll not see a shopping cart or Add to Cart buttons, but Magento was the tool we used. Take a look at the gallery, comment the sites you like. Subscribe to RSS. Share it with you friends. Also, we would welcome your submissions of new stores you own, you created or just the ones you like.
url: http://somesite.domain/index.php/furniture/? price=1%2C199 You could therefore create simple HTML like <select onchange=setLocation(this.value)> <option value=http://somesite.domain/all/? price=1%2C10000> <! Here you place your own ranges > 0,00 10 000,00 </option> <option value=http://somesite.domain/all/? price=2%2C10000> <! Here you place your own ranges > 10 000,00 20 000,00 </option> <option value=http://somesite.domain/all/? price=3%2C10000> <! Here you place your own ranges > 20 000,00 30 000,00 </option> </select> And put it into some of the static block. Notice the links in above HTML code. The /all part of the url is the url key of the All category in which we added all of our products. Last, but not least is understanding of the price= parametar. 1%2C10000 where 1 stands for first range of 10000 (last number) or 2%2C10000 where 2 stands for second ranfge of 10000, (first would be 0-10000). So if we were to write something like 3%2C10 it would be the price range from 20-30, where 3 stands for third range of tens (number 10). Firs is from 0-10, second 10-20, third 20-30.
Hi, I like your work with Magento, and i see that yre not affraid of experimenting. My question is relative to http:// www.raspberrykids.com. I like the layout, especially folder tab with Description, Tags etc. I didnt find such a feature in Magento. Can you explain it on Inchoo web (in some article), of course, only when it isnt company secret ) Thankx. Have a nice day. Online stores on magentique.com are not only our works. Magentique is the gallery that lists all Magento sites and not only our portfolio. Regarding blog topics, we try to write about the things we work on. However, we can not cover all Magento possibilities. Hope you agree.
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Can an online store have only one product? Sure it can and we give you the one that just launched. Kapitol Reef was founded to develop, perfect, manufacture and market a new breed of snorkels based upon pressure-balanced breathing in the aquatic environment. The entire focus for this company is to deliver best-of-class products, starting with the snorkel. Kapitol Reef is in the market for many years and this week they published a new site. Similar to our work on Teraflex project, we used Wordpress and Magento platforms for the development. The request was to have an extensive online store solution with multiple customers groups. Those groups should have different product prices and different payment options. Magento seemed like a great solution for such a request, although the initial concern was if it might be an overkill considering the fact we only have one product to start with? When the development started to roll out, the concern was no more. This will work superbly. We give you the new Magento store that uses a combination of Wordpress and Magento. Magento portion of the site is visible from the Online Store tab.
<label for="lastname">< ?php echo $this->__('Last name') ?> <input id="lastname" name="lastname" class="<em/><strong>inp
<label for="useremail">< ?php echo $this->__('Email') ?> <sp <input type="text" name="useremail" id="useremail" class="<e
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="<?php echo $this-/ </form>< ?php /* END OF my-custom-form */?>
<script type="text/javascript"> //< ![CDATA[ var customForm = new VarienForm('<em><strong>my-custom-form< //]]> </script>
You will notice all of the input fields have one common class name, required-entry. Im not gonna go over all of the available class names here. To find available class names, try going to One page checkout page, where you have checkout form, then simply view source and look for class names next to input, radio select and other fields. Most important thing besides assigning class names is that little piece of JavaScript below the form. Remember to pass form id into the new VarienForm object. Basically thats it. Constructing the form this way, automaticaly makes your form reuse already existing validation code, the one that the rest of the shop is using.
CSRF Attack Prevention

If you login to your Magento admin today, you are welcomed with message box that says: CSRF Attack Prevention Read details ! Yesterday Magento team acknowledged CSRF vulnerability and provided solution in a form of tutorial to change admin path (frontName) of your Magento shop. I find this approach strange and funny at the same time. Is hiding vulnerability new way of fixing it? Especially since some users of French Magento forums found similar problem in downloader (Magento connect manager). I can confirm this couse i tested it myself. The most funny part was that Magento cached my get request so i couldnt get rid of my test alert box Few fast tips for Magento admins: 1. Follow official Magento news, forums, updates. 2. Dont click suspicious links. These kind of attacks are usually done through malformed links that admin clicks through mail, comment, or any other source. 3. Clear saved passwords from browsers. Since most web browsers offer to remember passwords, and then autocomplete them, these kind of attack could easily stole your password.
You may also notice a styled color switcher feature we developed for this project. As this product comes in various colors, we decided to spice up the product info page and style the color choosing to replace the default select box.
Form Validation in Magento | Inchoo

One of the coolest things in Magento is a form validation, and the way how its done. Magento uses Prototype library (which, personlay, Im not a big fan of) to manage form validation. All you need to do when writing custom form is to assign a valid class names to your input fields. Here is an example of how your custom form might look in order to get use of automatic form validation.
<form name="<em><strong>my-custom-form</strong>" id="my-custom-form" action="" method="post"> <label for="firstname">< ?php echo $this->__('First name') ?> <span class="required">*</span></label><br /> <input id="firstname" name="firstname" class="<em/><strong>input-text required-entry</strong>" />
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Magento Connect
One of the first things that really confused me when i start using Magento is Magento connect. I just started learning things, so i was looking for some plugin examples. I visited Magento connect page with extensions and looked for download button, instead i found Get extension key one. If i recall correctly their What is this? explanation wasnt the same back then .. or i was just so terrified of Magento at start that i didnt understand anything at that point I knew i need to paste that key somewhere, in something they called my Magento connect manager or Magento downloader, but i didnt understand where it is. Visit Magento connect page. There are really some great extensions there and many of them are free. Find extension that interest you, click Get extension key, agree with license agreement and get key. Pay attention to Stability description field (stable, alpha, beta).
This really depends on your server configuration, however its always good to restore permissions to defaults if they are changed to 777, just to be sure.
Magento and Google Website Optimizer

I attended a webinar yesterday called Maximizing Magento Webinar: Optimizing Conversions with Website Testing. It was a nice and informative hour-long webinar with Google and Magento team speakers that provided us some really useful information. First of all, you should know what Google Website Optimizer is. Its a powerful tool that allows you to test various page concepts directly on your visitors and see which of your ideas works best in practice. The idea behind Google Website Optimizer is You should test that. If you have an idea you dont know will workor whether it will increase you conversionsGoogle has created this tool to help you test it. Google Website Optimizer is easily integrated in Magento. You can test various changes on your product pages and see which ones work best for your visitors. Only product page integration between Magento and Google Website Optimizer is made for now, however according to Roy Rubin, we can expect integration with our shopping cart and checkout pages soon. What Google Website Optimizer does is serve different variations of your site to the visitors so that you can test which one converts best. You can set up easily A-B compare where you serve half of your visitors one page variation and half of your visitors another. Then all you have to do is compare results or set up multiple page variations. The Optimizer gives you nice, clean reports where you can see how are your page variations performing. To learn more about conversion rates, read how to improve your web shop conversion rates. TIPS: Run the tests for at least a week or a sample of 10,000 visitors or more. You cant know if the page variation is actually good if your test sample was too small. Do the big changes first, then fine-tune later. This one comes from the Google and their experience with Website Optimizer. You should first try to make big differences and see in which direction has the response you want, then refine the pages for optimal conversions. If you cant see the change in first five seconds of viewing the page variation, the change is too small. Beware of HiPPO! This one also comes from Google. HiPPO stands for Highest Paycheck Persons Opinion. When you have powerful tool such as Google Website Optimizer, you can actually test all the ideas and see which one makes you the most money. HiPPO will often want to serve his visitors his ideadespite the fact that he could earn more by serving them some other variation.
If you click Settings tab of your connect manager you will see Preferred State option there. If youre installing extension with different stability or you get something similar to you should change this option to appropriate one. You should of course be careful with alphas and betas and know what youre doing. If you are developer or just interested, ftp to downloader/ pearlib/download after you install extension and youll find packed downloaded extensions there. After you use the downloader do you need to change the folder permissions back for security reasons or is it OK just to leave them at 777?
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Extending Order object and hooking on event in Magento

One of my previous articles was a Magento Event Hooks. This one will be a practical example on using the event hooks. Although the more proper way would be to call them Observers, bare with me. Im use to this hooks. Heres the walk-trough on how to add a new property (attribute) to an object (Mage_Sales_Model_Order object in our case). To add an attribute to object, we need (the dirty way) 2 little steps Go to app/code/core/Mage folder. If you drill down into most of the folders and go to /Model subfolder there you will see /Entity subfolder under /Model for most of the stuff (modules) under /Mage. For our example we go to app/code/core/Mage/Sales/Model/ Entity/Setup.php file. This Setup.php file holds Objects fields definitions in database. We need to add new fields to public function getDefaultEntities(). Once again, this is the quick and dirty way of adding new attributes. The propper way would be to create the sql file and update config file to read the new sql file and Whatever, I havent got the whole day Here is the code in my example, that I added to the array in public function getDefaultEntities().
'inchoo_custom_info' => array( 'type' 'backend' 'frontend' 'label' 'input' 'class' 'source' 'global' 'visible' 'required' 'user_defined' 'default' 'searchable' 'filterable' 'comparable' 'visible_on_front' 'visible_in_advanced_search' 'unique' ), => => => => => => => => => => => => => => => => => =>
wonder where did I pool the number 11 from? If you open your database (with any tool), and go to sales_order table, you will notice entity_type_id column. Each and every entry in sales_order table has the same value for entity_type_id column. In my Magento installation, this value is 11. Keep in mind that this does not have to mean yours will also be the same. To confirm everything went ok, just Search the database for the inchoo_custom_info (or whatever you used for attribute name). Ok, now that we added new attribute (property) to Order object, we will go on to Observer part. We will create a hook that will watch for successfull checkout process and trigger appropriate code execution. In my example I needed to add some extra info to order upon its successfull creation. Meaning as soon as checkout process is successfully executed, order is stored in database with some extra info I saved in its previously created field inchoo_custom_info. Here is my Observer file, I called it Observer.php and its saved under app/code/local/Inchoo/HookSystem/Model/ Observer.php.
< ?php class Inchoo_HookSystem_Model_Observer { /** * Event Hook: checkout_type_onepage_save_order * @param $observer Varien_Event_Observer */
public function hookToOrderSaveEvent() 'text', { '', /** '', * NOTE: 'Extra info', * Order has already been saved, now we simply add some stuff 'textarea', * that will be saved to database. We add the stuff to Order '', * called "inchoo_custom_info" '', */ Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Attribute::SCOPE_STORE, $order = new Mage_Sales_Model_Order(); true, $incrementId = Mage::getSingleton('checkout/session')->getLa false, false, $order->loadByIncrementId($incrementId); '', false, $extraInfo = array( false, 'shirt_color' => 'Freakin cool blue color', false, 'developer_is_freak' => true, true, 'coded_by' => 'Branko Ajzele, Web Application Develop false, ); false, $extraInfo = serialize($extraInfo);
Basically you can copy-paste some existing attribute that suites you the most and just change the array key name. Run this code only once (you can place it inside any file, like index.php or view.phtml or any other that you will execute) then uncomment or remove this code.
$order->setData('inchoo_custom_info', $extraInfo); $order->save(); } }
$setup = new Mage_Eav_Model_Entity_Setup('core_setup'); Since $AttrCode = 'inchoo_custom_info'; files.
NOTE: In code above, note the line $setup>addAttribute(11, $AttrCode, $settings). You probabily
$settings = array('position' => 1, 'is_required' => 0); $setup->addAttribute('11', $AttrCode, $settings); < ?xml version="1.0"?> <config>
this is a module, we also need to add some config Here is the content of my app/code/local/Inchoo/ HookSystem/etc/config.xml
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<global> <models> <hooksystem> <class>Inchoo_HookSystem_Model</class> </hooksystem> </models> </global> <frontend> <events> <checkout_onepage_controller_success_action> <observers> <hooksystem_order_success> <type>singleton</type> <class>hooksystem/observer</class> <method>hookToOrderSaveEvent</method> </hooksystem_order_success> </observers> </checkout_onepage_controller_success_action> </events> </frontend> </config>
avoid editing the default one). You can download Admintheme module here. Important: Our colour highlighting plugin on this site seems to lower-case some tag names on xml code, so keep that in mind if you experience some trouble with sample code. Huh, we are done! Final result is shown on image. Cheers
Happy 1st birthday Magento

Magento celebrates his 1st birthday today and we wish to congratulate them for the first successful year. In this year Magento evolved to fully usable online store application and reached version 1.1. Over 425,000 downloads makes it the fastest growing ecommerce platform on the market. Community presented over 165 extensions via Magento Connect, but the real number of add ons is much greater. Inchoo and Surgeworks will keep you posted for about further development. Unprintable Content (Video, Flash, etc.)
And one more config file to add to app/etc/modules/ Inchoo_HookSystem.xml.

< ?xml version="1.0"?> <config> <modules> <inchoo_hooksystem> <active>true</active> <codepool>local</codepool> </inchoo_hooksystem> </modules> </config>
Internal Server Error

Many of us who started experimenting with this interface and tried to place various values for Base URL, came to a dead end where Magento breaks. Usually, we get Internal Server Error 500 with each page load. The problem lies in the fact that we can no longer open the Magento administration to correct the error. What needs to be done in such a scenario?
And for the final step, open the app/design/adminhtml/ default/mytheme/template/sales/order/view/tab/ info.phtml file and add the following to it:
< ?php /** START CUSTOM Coded by Branko Ajzele | branko.ajzele@surgeworks.com me ?>message today: One of our clients wrote */ a < ?php I have put www.mydomain.com in a bad spot. /** I changed the base URL to {{base_URL}} and * NOTE: * 'inchoo_custom_info' assumes you have added new attribute/property to Sale/Order entity error on both now im getting a 500 server * Please use serialize and unserialize with 'inchoo_custom_info' the front end and the admin panel. I have */ looked through the database and cannot find $extraInfo = $_order->getData('inchoo_custom_info'); the right field to change this value back. Can ?> you point me in the right direction? < ?php if($extraInfo != null or !empty($extraInfo)): ?> < ?php $extraInfo = unserialize($extraInfo) ?> The client went to System> Configuration> Web> Unsecure <div class="entry-edit"> and placed an invalid value for Base URL field. Beware of this <div class="entry-edit-head"> <h4 class="icon-head head-products">Extra order info</h4> field. Unfortunately, Magento just updates it without any pre</div> warnings, but change of this specific value can cause Magento </div> to crash. <div style="height: 30px; padding: 10px; border: #ccc 1px solid; margin-bottom: 20px;"> <pre> Usually, we get an error that looks like this: < ?php print_r($extraInfo) ?> The server encountered an internal error or </pre> </div> misconfiguration and was unable to complete <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> your request. <div class="clear"></div> < ?php endif; ?> Please contact the server administrator, < ?php /** END CUSTOM Coded by Branko Ajzele | branko.ajzele@surgeworks.com */ ?> webmaster@mysite.com and inform them of
Feel free to remove all my comments. One thing to keep in mind here, the url path has the mytheme pointing to my custom theme. Usefull if you do not wish to edit default admin tempate files. Cooworker and friend of mine, Ivan Weiller, wrote a nice little plugin for switching the admin themes (to
the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
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Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. The client was on right path to find a solution. We need to open MySQL (usually via php MyAdmin) and find core_config_data table. Once there, manually update 2 rows: 1. config_id:3 web/unsecure/base_url www.mydomain.com/ 2. config_id:4 web/secure/base_url www.mydomain.com/ => => http:// https://
One of the projects I was assigned few weeks ago had a great amount of products, total of 46 268 to be more precise. Most of these are simple products with Visibility:Nowhere and are used strictly as Associated products in some Configurable products. Configurable products are for the most part shown to the user on frontend. All in all, there is a handful of Configurable products in the system, each holding couple of thousands Associated product. There are two issues here. First and most annoying issue I came across in this WTF configuration is the performance. Complete collapse of any reasonable execution time. Loading a page that holds this kind of Configurable product takes from 3-9 minutes, both on frontend and backend. Im talking about 3-9 minutes on local machine with maximum resource settings for PHP and MySQL. Second issue here is obvious misunderstanding of Magento product types and how to use them. I have already done Magento project with the approximately same total number of products in system. Number of products itself does not impose that much noticeable performance drop if the products are used the smart way. By smart way I think in terms where you have wast amount independent Simple products. Magento can handle that quite well. However, having large amount of relations like those Configurable Products > Associated Products can kill your store to usability equals zero. Here is where I draw the line on developers part. If you are lucky enough to get working on a new Magento related project from scratch you are obliged to recognize these kind of issues and react on time. Change the approach to the way how products need to be presented in the system and so on. It is unacceptable to create thousands of Associated products just to make them affect the final price of Configurable product. If you need to come up with solution like this, try developing a custom module to work around the issue not go with it. Performance drop is guarantied in cases like above. So if the client comes with the idea like I have a lot of products that kind of fall into the category of Configurable products that can use this and that as Associated product to stay dynamic in that and that selection you need to stop, think twice how this will affect store as whole and then propose the solution. No need to blindly go with clients (owners) suggestions. His prime wish is to get his store working and selling with least amount of budget as possible. Now lets look at the owners (clients). Ive noticed a lot of owners have special request for Magento store. Lot of them have products that kind of fit under the category of Grouped, Bundled and Configurable products. This is great actually, since all of these come out of the box in Magento. Whats not so great is that their wishes can sometimes be quite unreasonable. Lets look at the color switcher functionality lot of people ask to be implemented. This kind of functionality is mostly done by JavaScript where one hides select box that Magento would normally show under product options, and so on.
Everything should work now. Hope this will help someone.
How to fully disable (turn off) Magento module

Although the title might sound silly and so easy, there are lot of people having difficulties with this. At first turning Magento module can be easy as going trough System Configuration > Current Configuration Scope > Advanced > Advanced > Disable Module Output. However, be very careful, this action only disables module output as it says. If your module uses, lets say some Observer functionality to hook into some part of the system and does some overriding then those actions wont be disabled. do you have a solution to fully disable a Module just for a specific Website, Store or View? Its a Problem Ive been having for a while. An just disabling the output doesnt do the trick.
Magento site owners: Get serious, focus on what matters the most
For the last year or so I have been actively involved in online store development based on Magento ECOMMERCE platform. Everyone involved in Magento development can tell you that Magento extensively uses OOP approach. Although not everyone will agree, I like the way platform has been architectured in the backend. Layouts and config files enable you great deal of power without even writing a line of PHP code. Its not perfect, but what is. I believe most of you heard the cliche: With great power comes great responsibility. Lets discuss this in regards to Magento. There is a plain and simple message I wish to shout to current and future owners of Magento powered online stores: Get serious, focus on what matters the most!. Now what exactly did I have (and still have) in mind with statement like this? Unlike WordPress and Drupal (no offense, I use them, I respect them) not everyone can develop quality modules (extensions) for Magento. Platform itself requires developer a decent amount of knowledge from PHP OOP and other fancy object related concepts. As mentioned in one of my previous articles, Observers and overrides are among my favorite concepts (approaches) in Magento module development.
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We realize there are already dozens of sites related to snippets and code sharing, but none for Magento development. Site is built on Drupal CMS. There are still lot of styling left to do at the present time, but the site is usable. Branko hopes that you will not find the site too ugly since he designed it We all love the simplicity of it that makes the code snippets highly usable. What makes these code snippets special is that little drop down field next to each snippet entry where you mark down the version of Magento for which snippet has been tested for. The search functionality is planned soon. Hopefully this project will become handy in those situations where you find yourself with broken Magento code for some reason. The next step for you is to register and share a feedback. Help the community by adding your own examples of code. Here is one Snippi example:
Sure it looks great, its looks cool but the real question is How much will it improve your selling?. I realize the usability can be as much as important as functionality. By now, there are even some color switcher modules you can buy. However, most of magento modules require additional work to be properly implemented in order to fit the owners wishes. Due to the complexity of Magento platform, sometimes even the smaller changes require lot of time and effort on developer part. This would all be great and shinny if everything would work after the upgrading Magento store when the new version appears. All this leaves entire development process focused on the little things. I say, why not style the theme to the end with the default Magento page setup. Why change the output of product view page? Why not leave it default, just fully style it to match your design. This kinf of approach would be far more safer in terms of upgrades and in terms of bringing the project to the end in as much as possible short timing. What Im trying to say, Magento comes extremely feature rich out of the box. Development time is not free, and to my opinion it should be focused on either building fresh, new features for the store or at other parts of the system like Promotions, Catalog price rules, Shopping cart price rules, Customer groups. The latter one seem to be relatively ignored in the big picture. Adding features like color switcher could be left for latter phase of development, the one after the site goes live. The one you are sure your store is working the way it should, its stable, nicely styled, optimized for best performance, and quite well structured so its relatively bullet prof on updates. Then you can start adding modules, fancy usability tweaks and so on.
Advanced Search sidebar box

I was playing a bit with that advanced search form in Magento, so i thought it would be nice touch to add it to left or right column of the store. Since that multiple selects were causing problems and i also had to get rid of breadcrumb, i created block which extends Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Advanced_Form functionality, added a little javascript and packed it all to small example module: Unpack the rar, copy files at its appropriate place following directory structure, disable/enable cache to rebuild configs, layouts, blocks, and youre on.

Hello everybody. We are very happy to announce that Snippi hit the net. This is a personal project of Branko Ajzele, one of our developers, that went live few days ago. He was developing it for some time now and I hope it will be usable for all of you Magento developers who are trying to find a solution for your specific needs. Snippi is a Magento related website for sharing Magento code snippets. You can see it live on http://snippi.net Finding a solution for specific need can be a nightmare in Magento since you are faced with the process of heavy digging through Magento forum and Magento related blogs. Very soon you will notice that many people had the same issue as you do, but no concrete answer. Youll probably find chunks of code that can help, but youll have to put it all together. Snippis goal is to help you in this process.
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September 8th, 2009
google charts so its trying to connect to that, but everything else will work fine.
Display Promotion
There are two unused product list blocks in Magento which can be very useful if you push a few buttons, edit few layouts .. 1. Promotion Block located in app\code\core\Mage\Catalog\Block \Product\List\Promotion.php This is basically built in featured product functionality. It reacts to promotion attribute which needs to be created, so lets click Catalog->Attributes->Manage Attributes->Create New Attribute
CoffeeFreak Blank Magento extension for building main admin menu with sidebar and tabs
My previous article, CoolDash Blank Magento extension for building admin system configuration area, was about blank start-up extension for building System > Configuration admin area. I used a lot of funny attribute names so that get around gets some speed. This extension is somewhat similar to previous one, except its meant to be a blank start-up extension for building items under main admin menu with sidebar and tabs. Keep in mind that, once again, extension name is something I popped out of my head while I was making myself a coffee:). Below are two screenshots for you to see final result. In short, this extension demonstrates the use of controllers (router definition under config file) and widgets in Magento. Download Inchoo_CoffeeFreak extension for Magento. Hope you find it useful.
Attribute Code: promotion Scope: Global Catalog Input Type for Store Owner: Yes/No
Offline Magento problems

I was working recently on a local server without internet connection (nothing can stop us !! ) and i noticed that Magento administration is extremely slow. Some parts of administration took up to 10 seconds to load. On every page view in admin Magento was trying to resolve widgets.magentocommerce.com address and connect to it few times which caused time delay. His notification system was trying to grab new message. The solution was to disable Mage_AdminNotification module and since i was offline i didnt really need it. You can do it in System -> Advanced -> Disable modules output Some other admin parts which are using online resources will still be slower, like Dashboard for example because it is using
Label: Promotion (second tab) Other params can be left alone, but its up to you of course. I also labeled it Promotion just for this article. Now we need to add created attribute to attribute set, so navigate to Catalog->Attributes->Manage Attribute Sets select attribute set youre using and drag promotion to General group for example.
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<block type="catalog/product_list_random" name="product_random" template="catalog/product/ list.phtml"/> since it also extends product_list block, however, since it is random product listing, that toolbar has no purpose here, so create phtml that will suit your shop needs, based on catalog/ product/list.phtml. For example, im using similar Random block to display random products in sidebar. So long, take care, im off
CoolDash Blank Magento extension for building admin system configuration area
Now when youre editing your products, there is new Promotion option under General tab. In order to speed things up with building admin sections under System > Configuration area in Magento I wrote a little blank extension. Hopefully its a step or two beyond Hello world level. I named the extension CoolDash, short from CoolDashboard. Name holds no special meaning, just something I popped out of my head. First thing you might notice when you open config.xmls and system.xml is the attribute naming. I intentionally used names like somecooldashmodel2. I found it extremely difficult, error prone and annoying to get around in scenarios where different areas of config files use same names for attributes with different meaning, like customer, catalog and so on. Hopefully my funny naming scheme in config files will give you a better overview on where everything goes. Below are few screenshots to see the result.
How to override Magento model classes?

Many times we need to implement new functionality of existing Magento core classes, but we dont want to modify core classes. For controllers, thats quite easy. Usually we can copy controller from core and put it in the same place in local directory, modify class and thats it. Of course, there are better ways to do that (make module), but Im not going to write about that right now since it is not subject of this post. I only mentioned that because we cant do same thing for models even if we want to, so how to override Magento models without modifying core files? Fortunately, thats very easy =) Lets make one extension of that kind! Extension we are going to make will be useless, only difference between this extension and original class will be class name var_dump =) What we are going to do now is to take a random model class from Magento core. Let it be Mage_Wishlist_Model_Item located in app/code/ core/Mage/Wishlist/Model/Item.php
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Products on which you select Yes will be shown on promotion block which can be displayed through layouts with <block type="catalog/product_list_promotion" name="product_promotion" template="catalog/product/ list.phtml"/> or as cms content with {{block type='catalog/product_list_promotion' template='catalog/product/list.phtml'}} This attribute should really be included in default attribute set or in Magento sample data. 2. Random Block located in app\code\core\Mage\Catalog\Block \Product\List\Random.php This block loads random product collection from current store. The fastest way to display it would also be something like
September 8th, 2009
What we want to do is to add new functionality to that class, so lets make new module. Call it Inchoo_Wishlist. Create app/code/local/Inchoo/Wishlist/model/ directory and copy app/code/core/Mage/Wishlist/Model/Item.php there. Now, rename class Mage_Wishlist_Model_Item Inchoo_Wishlist_Model_Item. Add this line:
var_dump(get_class($this)); exit();
Its free. This one is a no-brainer, you dont need to invest any money in it. Its fast. You dont need to wait for it to be finished, you just download it and use it. It works. Most of the free Magento themes work just fine with Magento out of the box. However, truth be told, I believe the cons of having a free Magento theme give you enough reason to go for custom design: Its unprofessional. A visitor (your potential buyer) might realize youre using a free theme. This will make him wonder, can he really trust your website? Is it a real company standing behind this online store? Can I really give my credit card to these guys? They probably arent a serious company if they dont have money for the design that fits their companys identity. There might be no support. If something goes wrong, there might be no one to help you. Magento can change a lot at upgrade and some themes might start showing errors. There might be no support for new features. Magento is constantly developing ecommerce platform and new features will always be presented. Some of the free templates might not keep up with Magentos development and youll end up without the ability to use some of the cool new features that rolled out, wile your competitors with custom design will have this advantage. The free theme probably isnt really optimized for best conversion rate. Some free themes are done with conversion rates in mind, however, the conversion rate optimization usually depends on your niche and targeted audience. A design and layout that works for a certain company might not be so good in converting visitors into sales in your niche.
to
in loadByProductWishlist method Now, lets create Inchoo_Wishlist.xml in app/etc/modules/ Put this code there:
< ?xml version="1.0"?> <config> <modules> <inchoo_wishlist> <active>true</active> <codepool>local</codepool> </inchoo_wishlist> </modules> </config>
Now, make app/code/local/Inchoo/Wishlist/etc/Config.xml file and put this code there:

< ?xml version="1.0"?> <config> <modules> <inchoo_wishlist> <version>0.1</version> </inchoo_wishlist> </modules> <global> <models> <wishlist> <rewrite> <item>Inchoo_Wishlist_Model_Item</item> </rewrite> </wishlist> </models> </global> </config>
Custom designed Magento themes:

I will not list disadvantages of custom designed Magento themes since their disadvantages are already listed as advantages of free themes. Here are some really important pros for getting yourself a custom designed Magento theme: Unique design that fits your companys identity. This is extremely important if youre into any serious business. Building a strong corporate identity is crucial for establishing a recognized brand. Your online store will not only make you profit with the sales you make, but it will also help build a brand image with your targeted audience. Someone you can count on. If you choose a reliable company to create a Magento theme for your store, you know they will be there once the Magento upgrade comes to fix any potential problems. They will be there to help you change things around once the change is required and they will be there to consult you and share their experience and best practices.
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You are done! Try to add something to wishlist! =) Play with other models as well! Cheers ^_^
Free Magento Themes vs Custom Magento Design

This blog post describes pros and cons of having a free Magento theme versus having a custom Magento design from a marketing perspective.
Free Magento Themes:

There are some pretty obvious advantages of using a free Magento theme:
September 8th, 2009

$shippingPrice = '0.00'; } $method->setPrice($shippingPrice); $method->setCost($shippingPrice); $result->append($method); } return $result; }
Unique features. Your online store is specific, you are a member of some niche. Most niches will require some additional functions that Magento doesnt support by default to make the best out of your online store. If you choose to work with experienced development company, they will be able to provide you with development solutions for your problems. This is something you cant get with free or premium Magento themes.
Creating Custom Shipping Method in Magento - The Tutorial | Inchoo

In this article I will demonstrate how to write custom shipping method in Magento commerce. First we need to write our shipping method, its a class in folder app/code/core/Mage/Shipping/Model/Carrier/. I called it Inchoocustom.php and its based on Flat rate shipping method but you can developed your own class.
< ?php class Mage_Shipping_Model_Carrier_Inchoocustom extends Mage_Shipping_Model_Carrier_Abstract implements Mage_Shipping_Model_Carrier_Interface { protected $_code = 'inchoocustom';
public function getAllowedMethods() { return array('inchoocustom'=>$this->getConfigData('n } }
Pay attention on following lines:

$method->setCarrier('inchoocustom'); $method->setCarrierTitle($this->getConfigData('title')); $method->setMethod('inchoocustom'); $method->setMethodTitle($this->getConfigData('name'));
They determine how we will set up our method. Keyword is inchoocustom. In folder app/code/core/Mage/Shipping/etc/ we need to edit system.xml and config.xml in order to enable our new shipping method. system.xml:
public function collectRates(Mage_Shipping_Model_Rate_Request $request) <inchoocustom translate="label"> { <label>Inchoo Custom Shipping Method</la if (!$this->getConfigFlag('active')) { <frontend_type>text</frontend_type> return false; <sort_order>2</sort_order> } <show_in_default>1</show_in_default> <show_in_website>1</show_in_website> $freeBoxes = 0; <show_in_store>1</show_in_store> if ($request->getAllItems()) { <fields> foreach ($request->getAllItems() as $item) { <active translate="label"> if ($item->getFreeShipping() && !$item->getProduct()->isVirtual()) { <label>Enabled</label> $freeBoxes+=$item->getQty(); <frontend_type>select</frontend_ } <source_model>adminhtml/system_c } <sort_order>1</sort_order> } <show_in_default>1</show_in_defa $this->setFreeBoxes($freeBoxes); <show_in_website>1</show_in_webs <show_in_store>0</show_in_store> $result = Mage::getModel('shipping/rate_result'); </active> if ($this->getConfigData('type') == 'O') { // per order <name translate="label"> $shippingPrice = $this->getConfigData('price'); <label>Method name</label> } elseif ($this->getConfigData('type') == 'I') { // per item <frontend_type>text</frontend_ty $shippingPrice = ($request->getPackageQty() * $this->getConfigData('price')) - ($this->getFreeBoxes() * $ <sort_order>3</sort_order> } else { <show_in_default>1</show_in_defa $shippingPrice = false; <show_in_website>1</show_in_webs } <show_in_store>1</show_in_store> $shippingPrice = $this->getFinalPriceWithHandlingFee($shippingPrice);
</name> <price translate="label"> <label>Price</label> if ($shippingPrice !== false) { <frontend_type>text</frontend_ty $method = Mage::getModel('shipping/rate_result_method'); <sort_order>5</sort_order> <show_in_default>1</show_in_defa $method->setCarrier('inchoocustom'); <show_in_website>1</show_in_webs $method->setCarrierTitle($this->getConfigData('title')); <show_in_store>0</show_in_store> </price> $method->setMethod('inchoocustom'); <handling_type translate="label"> $method->setMethodTitle($this->getConfigData('name')); <label>Calculate Handling Fee</l <frontend_type>select</frontend_ if ($request->getFreeShipping() === true || $request->getPackageQty() == $this->getFreeBoxes()) { <source_model>shipping/source_ha
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<sort_order>7</sort_order> </specificerrmsg> <show_in_default>1</show_in_default> </fields> <show_in_website>1</show_in_website> </inchoocustom> <show_in_store>0</show_in_store> </handling_type> config.xml: <handling_fee translate="label"> <inchoocustom> <label>Handling Fee</label> <active>0</active> <frontend_type>text</frontend_type> <sallowspecific>0</sallowspecific> <sort_order>8</sort_order> <model>shipping/carrier_inchoocustom</model> <show_in_default>1</show_in_default> <name>Inchoo Custom Shipping Method</name> <show_in_website>1</show_in_website> <price>5.00</price> <show_in_store>0</show_in_store> <title>Inchoo Custom Shipping Method</title> </handling_fee> <type>I</type> <sort_order translate="label"> <specificerrmsg>This shipping method is curr <label>Sort order</label> <handling_type>F</handling_type> <frontend_type>text</frontend_type> </inchoocustom> </sort_order><sort_order>100</sort_order> <show_in_default>1</show_in_default> Now we <show_in_website>1</show_in_website> need to enable our new shipping method in admin <show_in_store>0</show_in_store> panel (System->Configuration->Shipping Methods)
<title translate="label"> <label>Title</label> Enjoy coding. <frontend_type>text</frontend_type> <sort_order>2</sort_order> There are <show_in_default>1</show_in_default> 11 comments <show_in_website>1</show_in_website> <show_in_store>1</show_in_store> </title> <type translate="label"> <label>Type</label> <frontend_type>select</frontend_type> Latest version of Magento, as of time of this writing, is 1.3.2.3. <source_model>adminhtml/system_config_source_shipping_flatrate</source_model> <sort_order>4</sort_order> Latest, as well as previous versions come with half-packed <show_in_default>1</show_in_default>for TinyMCE editor. There are however few bugs and support <show_in_website>1</show_in_website> few steps that need to be handled in order to enable wysiwyg <show_in_store>0</show_in_store> editing in CMS pages. Personally I am not that big of a fan </type> of wysiwyg editors, mostly because I am developer and like to <sallowspecific translate="label"> <label>Ship to applicable countries</label> down. know what I write <frontend_type>select</frontend_type> However, most of the store owners are not developers or even <sort_order>90</sort_order> not that much technically savvy people (not that this is a <frontend_class>shipping-applicable-country</frontend_class> <source_model>adminhtml/system_config_source_shipping_allspecificcountries</source_model> bad thing) and they could use wysiwyg editors when adding, <show_in_default>1</show_in_default> content. modifying <show_in_website>1</show_in_website> <show_in_store>0</show_in_store> Here I will walk you trough few simple steps that will make </sallowspecific> you enable wysiwyg editing by using TinyMCE. You can see <specificcountry translate="label"> the screenshots of final result below. <label>Ship to Specific countries</label> <frontend_type>multiselect</frontend_type> Step 1: Download and unpack TinyMCE to root /js folder. <sort_order>91</sort_order> Two things to keep in mind here. Download regular version <source_model>adminhtml/system_config_source_country</source_model> (not jQuery version) of TinyMCE. This is due to the fact that <show_in_default>1</show_in_default> Magento <show_in_website>1</show_in_website> uses Prototype, so we need to avoid conflicts. Second, <show_in_store>0</show_in_store> watch out for unpack location. Your tiny_mce.js file should be </specificcountry> accessible on js/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js path. <showmethod translate="label"> Step 2: Open the <label>Show method if not applicable</label> app/code/core/Mage/Adminhtml/Block/ <frontend_type>select</frontend_type> Cms/Page/Edit/Tab/Main.php file. Locate the <sort_order>92</sort_order> <source_model>adminhtml/system_config_source_yesno</source_model> $fieldset->addField('content', 'editor', array( <show_in_default>1</show_in_default> 'name' => 'content', <show_in_website>1</show_in_website> 'label' => Mage::helper('cms')->__('Content'), <show_in_store>0</show_in_store> 'title' => Mage::helper('cms')->__('Content'), </showmethod> 'style' => 'height:36em;', <specificerrmsg translate="label"> 'wysiwyg' => false, <label>Displayed Error Message</label> 'required' => true, <frontend_type>textarea</frontend_type> )); <sort_order>80</sort_order> <show_in_default>1</show_in_default> and change it to <show_in_website>1</show_in_website> <show_in_store>1</show_in_store> $fieldset->addField('content', 'editor', array(
And we have our custom shipping method.
How to make TinyMCE work with Magento CMS pages
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September 8th, 2009

'name' => 'content', 'label' => Mage::helper('cms')->__('Content'), 'title' => Mage::helper('cms')->__('Content'), 'style' => 'height:36em;', 'wysiwyg' => true, 'theme' => 'advanced', 'required' => true, ));
file. If you are using store that does not have url rewrites this is something that needs to be done because your javascript file would not be found if you go trough link like http://store.local/index.php/js/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js. Then you would get TinyMCE shown on CMS page but it would be disabled. As you can see, there were only three minor changes needed (download, modify, modify) to get the TinyMCE editor working. Hope this helps. Cheers.
As you can see, here we changed on existing attribute (wysiwyg) value and added new attribute theme. Step 3: Open the /lib/Varien/Data/Form/Element/ Editor.php file and locate the method getElementHtml(). Here we change
$html = ' <textarea name="'.$this->getName().'" title="'.$this->getTitle().'" id="'.$this->getHtmlId().'" class="textarea '.$th <script type="text/javascript"> //< ![CDATA[ /* tinyMCE.init({ I was playing with some of the Magento controller functions mode : "exact", theme : "'.$this->getTheme().'", today, when I saw my coworker Vedran Subotic struggling elements : "' . $element . '", with turning the Path hints in On and Off every few minutes. theme_advanced_toolbar_location : "top", Idea cross my mind, and here is the result Inchoos Magento theme_advanced_toolbar_align : "left", Developer Toolbar prototype. theme_advanced_path_location : "bottom", extended_valid_elements : "a[name|href|target|title|onclick],img[class|src|border=0|alt|title|hspace|vspace|width|hei < ?php theme_advanced_resize_horizontal : "false", theme_advanced_resizing : "false", class Inchoo_Hints_IndexController extends Mage_Core_Control apply_source_formatting : "true", { convert_urls : "false", force_br_newlines : "true", public function init() doctype : \'< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict. { });*/ //]]> } </script>';
Magento Developer Toolbar prototype | Inchoo
to
public function indexAction() { $hints = $_storeBaseUrl = str_replace('index.php', '', Mage::getBaseUrl()); $this->getRequest()->getParam('hints'); //Just to test retrieved url //echo '$_storeBaseUrl: '.$_storeBaseUrl;
$_db = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource')->getConnection('c
if($hints) { $html = ' if($hints id="'.$this->getHtmlId().'" class="textarea '.$th <textarea name="'.$this->getName().'" title="'.$this->getTitle().'" == 'on') { <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="'.$_storeBaseUrl.'/js/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js"></script> $_db->query("UPDATE core_config_data SET value = '".$_SERVER <script type="text/javascript"> $_db->query("UPDATE core_config_data SET value = 1 WHERE pat //< ![CDATA[ $_db->query("UPDATE core_config_data SET value = 1 WHERE pat Event.observe(window, "load", function() { } tinyMCE.init({ mode : "exact", if($hints == 'off') theme : "'.$this->getTheme().'", { elements : "' . $element . '", $_db->query("UPDATE core_config_data SET value = '' WHERE pa theme_advanced_toolbar_location : "top", $_db->query("UPDATE core_config_data SET value = 0 WHERE pat theme_advanced_toolbar_align : "left", $_db->query("UPDATE core_config_data SET value = 0 WHERE pat theme_advanced_path_location : "bottom", } extended_valid_elements : "a[name|href|target|title|onclick],img[class|src|border=0|alt|title|hspace|vspace|width|hei } theme_advanced_resize_horizontal : "false", theme_advanced_resizing : "false", $_url = Mage::getUrl(''); apply_source_formatting : "true", convert_urls : "false", if(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])) $_url = $_SERVER['HTTP_R force_br_newlines : "true", doctype : \'< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict. $this->getResponse()->setRedirect($_url); }); } }); //]]> </script>'; public function cleanCacheAction() { $_url = Mage::getUrl('');
As you might noticed, I used $_storeBaseUrl in this other chunk of code to get the valid path to my TinyMCE javascript
if(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])) $_url = $_SERVER['HTTP_R
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September 8th, 2009

Mage::app()->cleanCache();
the WordPress and Magento. Probably everyone in web development has heard about WordPress. Personaly I like them, from Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress But there is that $this->getResponse()->setRedirect($_url); little something that makes WordPress far more loving in the } eyes of the client. Not to start a flame here, lets get back to public function cleanPhotoCacheAction() the topic. Due to the lack of the proper content management { in Magento those who use WordPress can easily manage the $_url = Mage::getUrl(''); (home page in this case) content trough WordPress and make it accessible in if(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])) $_url = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; Magento CMS page (that you can set to home page in Magento).
try { Mage::getModel('catalog/product_image')->clearCache(); } catch (Exception $e) { } $this->getResponse()->setRedirect($_url); } } < ?php //START INCHOO DEVELOPER TOOLBAR ?>
When would you like to do so? Imagine you have Magento installed in root of your site and WordPress under some folder like /articles. By default WordPress is accessed via http://mysite.domain/articles and Magento is accessed trough http://mysite.domain. Our goal is to have WordPress Page (that we will title home) to be accessible on http://mysite.domain. Here are the necessary steps involved:
< ?php $_inchoo_db = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource')->getConnection('core_write'); page named home (under url like Create a WordPress $hints_are_on = $_inchoo_db->fetchOne("SELECT value FROM core_config_data WHERE path = 'dev/debug/template_hints'"); http://mysite.domain/articles/wp-content) ?>
Create a file named cmswp_home.phtml under app/
<div style="line-height: 24px; font-size: 10px; font-family: Arial, Verdana; background: #004400; border-bottom:solid design/frontend/default/ <div> yourtheme_or_default_theme/template/inchoo/ <span style="font-weight: bold; margin-right: 10px; margin-left: 10px;">INCHOO TOOLBAR</span> folder < ?php if($hints_are_on): ?> <a style="text-decoration: none; color: #bbbbbb;" href="<?php Create $this->getUrl('inchoohints/index/index/hints/off') echo a Magento CMS page (if it already does < ?php else: ?> not exist) name it anyway you want and then <a style="text-decoration: none; color: #bbbbbb;" href="<?php echo $this->getUrl('inchoohints/index/index/hints/on') add {{block type=core/template template=inchoo/ < ?php endif; ?>
cmswp_home.phtml}} to its content
<a style="text-decoration: none; color: #bbbbbb;" href="<?php echo $this->getUrl('inchoohints/index/cleanCache') ?>"> echo $this->getUrl('inchoohints/index/cleanPhotoCache') <a style="text-decoration: none; color: #bbbbbb;" href="<?php Set the newly created Magento CMS page as home page for Magento under Magento Admin System > </div> </div> Configuration > Web > Default Pages > CMS Home Page < ?php //END INCHOO DEVELOPER TOOLBAR ?> < ?xml version="1.0"?> <config> <modules> <inchoo_hints> <version>1.0.0</version> </inchoo_hints> </modules> <frontend> <routers> <ihints> <use>standard</use> <args> <module>Inchoo_Hints</module> <frontname>inchoohints</frontname> </args> </ihints> </routers> </frontend> </config>
Below is the code you need to copy paste into the cmswp_home.phtml file mentioned in above steps.
< ?php
/** * Pulls the content of post named 'home' from WordPress 'wp_ * @author Branko Ajzele * @license GPL */
//Fetch database connection $_conn = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource')->getConnection(
//Set query that retrieves the home page content //THIS GOES IF YOU HAVE WORDPRESS AND MAGENTO IN SAME DATABS $_findHomePage = "SELECT post_content FROM wp_posts WHERE po
//Set default value of home page to null, then do a safe che $_homePageContent = null;
How to use WordPress home page in Magento home page (CMS page)
Simple : ) -Ok, lets get down to business. This one is really, really simple, but powerful. In all it greatness Magento lacks the good content management solution (CMS features). Lot of people are heading down the road of integrating
try { /* //IF YOU HAVE WORDPRESS AND MAGENTO INSTALLED EACH IN ITS OW $conf = array( 'host' => 'localhost', 'username' => 'wordpress_db_username', 'password' => 'wordpress_db_password', 'dbname' => 'wordpress_db_name' );
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$_resource = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource'); visitors are able to subscribe to your newsletter via Magento //Create new connection to new server and new databse Newsletter subscription form in sidebar. $_conn = $_resource->createConnection('place_some_free_random_resource_name_here', 'pdo_mysql', $conf); */ Besides newsletter subscribers, all of your stores registered $_homePageContent = $_conn->fetchOne($_findHomePage); } catch (Exception $ex) { //SEND EXCEPTION INFO TO ADMIN?
users will also appear in your Magentos newsletter e-mail database. This database also contains information on different store views, allowing you to easily send multiple variations of your newsletter to different store view subscribers. This feature is extremely useful when dealing with multiple language web shops.
/* * USE $emailSmtpConf, $transport and $mail->send($transport); in case you need to specify SMTP manualy $emailSmtpConf = array( Newsletter Template: 'auth' => 'login', The process of sending out Magento Newsletter starts 'ssl' => 'tls', 'username' => 'some_email@gmail.com', with creation of Newsletter Template. Once you create this 'password' => 'some_pass_here' template, the template will remain there even after you send );
How to send a Magento Newsletter?
your newsletter to subscribers, allowing you to change it and use it multiple times. $transport = new Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp('smtp.gmail.com', $emailSmtpConf); You can create multiple newsletter */ templates with different styling and test them to see which one attracts the most response from subscribers.
$_sendTo_email = 'ajzele@somemail.com'; $_sendFrom_email = 'branko.ajzele@somemail.com';
//Notify each item author about purchase $mail = new Zend_Mail(); $mail->addTo($_sendTo_email, 'Branko Ajzele'); $mail->setFrom($_sendFrom_email, 'Branko Ajzele'); $mail->setSubject('Invalid HOME PAGE on site detected'); Simply click on Add new template button on the right and $mail->setBodyHtml(' <h1>Invalid HOME PAGE on site detected</h1> start creating your first newsletter template. You will see a <p>There seem to be some issues with home page on your site. Please5 take aAll of the fields are required. You will also screen with fields. look at it.</p> <p>Could be that WordPress page has been disabled and this made the query for page return null.</p> notice that the largest field (Template content field) already '); has some sort of code inside. Do not remove this code. This try { //Try to send email code will generate the unsubscribe link for your newsletter. //$mail->send($transport); Make sure that whatever you do this code remains on the $mail->send(); bottom. } catch (Exception $ex) { When creating newsletter template for Magento, note that //echo $ex->getMessage(); you can actually use HTML in it. This means that if youre } } ?>
< ?php if($_homePageContent): ?> < ?php echo $_homePageContent ?> Newsletter Queue: < ?php else: ?> If you open this tab in the newsletter top menu, you will <h1>Home page unavailable</h1> <p>Seems like home page is unavailable at the moment. We notice that for the inconvenience.</p> queue. In order to apologize there are no newsletters in < ?php endif; ?> queue a newsletter you need to open Newsletter Template
not a tech savvy person, you can simply use some WYSIWYG editor and copy / paste the code it creates into your newsletter template once youre done. In addition, if you wish to have WYSWYG editor inside your magento, check out our article on how to use TinyMCE with Magento.
Thats it. If you wish to have more control over what is outputted take a look $_findHomePage variable and the query behind it. Hope you find this useful. Cheers.
screen once again and in the action box next to your template choose Queue Newsletter. This action will bring up the Edit Newsletter screen. Notice that you can choose which store view subscribers are going to receive the newsletter. To select multiple store views, hold Ctrl key and left click on store views you wish to use. (this will only be necessary if youre using more then one store view).
Magento Newsletter
If youre using Magento you probably noticed by now that you have integrated newsletter system with it. By default,
September 8th, 2009
You also need to set a Queue date start. Notices that the date and time you set are in fact server date and time, not your date and time. If you wish to send your newsletter immediately, you need to set it to your current server date and time or set it into past. Newsletter Subscribers Export: If you wish to use some other service for sending your newsletter you can easily export your Magento newsletter subscribers via admin panel. Access the Newsletter Subscribers screen via top menu. On the top right you will see select box with options to export your newsletter subscribers in form of CSV or XML. Export it in a form that best fits the import options of your other newsletter solution. Cant send Magento newsletter? Here are some common problems: Your server time is different then your local time and youve actually queued the newsletter to be sent a few hours in future and thats why its not sent right now. Magento sent only small part of emails? Dont worry, it will send them out. Magento has integrated limit on the number of emails it can send at once. Eventually, all of your emails will be sent. You might need to activate your cron job as its often a case cron job is causing you problem. This means you will need to visit this address insertyour-magento-store.com/cron.php manually with your internet browser.
and we dont want SIDs to appear to those visitors. Most important: We dont want that search engines index the URLs with SIDs.
NaviGate by MerchantPlus in Magento

Some merchants use NaviGate payment gateway from MerchatPlus because of the lesser costs than its big brother Authorize.net. Interesting this about this payment gateway is its compatibility with Authorize.net. So, if you need to enable it in Magento, you will not have to find someone who will have to write the module from scratch. You just need to use standard Authorize.net module, but with some modifications. So, to use Navigate, you have to enable Authorize.net module. NaviGate is compatible with Authorize.nets AIM Integration method. This means that any shopping cart or online store software that can connect to Authorize.net via this method can connect to NaviGate by following this steps: 1. In the Magento Administration Configuration> Payment Methods. panel, go to
2. Open the Authorize.net module and update the title as you see fit. Enter your NaviGate username and transaction key, which you generate under Profile & Settings in the NaviGate interface. 3. Change the Gateway URL to: https:// gateway.merchantplus.com/cgi-bin/PAWebClient.cgi 4. Enable Credit Card Verification, if you want to use the CVV code. 5. Then, go to your source code and open the file: /app/ code/core/Mage/Paygate/Model and find the string setCardCodeResponseCode . Change the line to: >setCardCodeResponseCode($r[38]); Save the file and you should be good! To assist your integration, MerchantPlus created the following developer tools (you will not need them in our case): For more information on the connection Authorize.nets AIM documentation. API, see
Remove SID from Magento URLs with .htaccess | Inchoo

Many people wonder why sometimes the SID part appears in their Magento URLs. This is when your URL has additional SID query usually at the end. Take a look at the image. The curiosity is that it does not appear always. What is the most common scenario it happens? You didnt access the site with the same domain variant you entered as your Base URL in your System> Configuration> Web interface. When you decide to launch the site, you have to decide whether you will market http://www.domain.com/ URL or http://domain.com/. This is an important decision and you shouldnt change your mind quite often. Search engines usually treat those two URLs as a different sites and therefore the Page Rank potential can be split between those two URLs. So, think about whether you will use www or not and stick by this decision. Once you decided, go to your System> Configuration> Web interface and enter the desired form to Base URL field. When you access the site you will notice that there are no SIDs when the URL matches the value from Base URL field and they appear when it does not. Now, we want the ability that the site redirects to proper URL once accessed. Someone can place a wrong link to some forum or blog. We dont want those links to lead to improper URL
Magento Flash Widgets Extension AMF Point

If you read our previous article where we made it clear we were working on something interesting for Magento store owners, you could see this coming.
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amfPoint is a Magento Extension that enables you to serve interactive flash widgets containing your products wherever and whenever you need them on your Magento store.
Google Analytics eCommerce data from Magento | Inchoo

Some of you who work with Magento for a long time might think that this topic is so clear that it doesnt need to have an article. We get many inquiries to finalize the work somebody already started. One of the things we notice is that some developers tend to embed the Google Analytics code directly in the Magento theme files. Yes, it works and you will see the standard traffic data in the Google Analytics interface, but it is not a way to go. In most of the cases, those developers edit footer.phtml in app/design/frontend/default/[your_theme]/ template/page/html folder. As I said, the Google Analytics will track visitors data properly, but the main issue is that the eCommerce data will not be collected. To enable eCommerce data to be visible, first step is that you let Google Analytics to know that the profile is actually an E-Commerce site. You will get to this interface by 1. Logging to Google Analytics 2. Select an account for this site 3. On the list of Account profiles, do not go to the reports, click on Edit instead 4. On the first box Main Website Profile Information, there is another Edit link to the right. Click on it. 5. One there, you will see the interface similar to the one on this image. Let Google Analytics know this is an eCommerce website Forums say that older versions of Magento before 1.2 do not properly track eCommerce data. In case you have older version of Magento and have this issue, do not install some special plugins. Upgrade Magento instead. Although Google Analytics will tell you to embed the javascript code on your website, you dont have to do that. You just need to see what is the Web Property ID of the profile. One you know it, go to the Magento administration to the interface: System> Configuration> Google API> Google Analytics. Enable it and insert that Web Property ID. Viola.
Magento CMS syntax part1

Every Magento user noticed that there is special {{magentocode}} syntax available in cms pages and blocks. We traced a bit to find out which params are available and what exactly they do. As strange as this may sound, processor class that gets called is Mage_Core_Model_Email_Template_Filter located at app/ code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Email/Template/Filter.php . There are also some interesting directives in superclass Varien_Filter_Template, but if im not mistaken, none of them can be used. There are six replacement codes that can be used and each triggers its equivalent Directive function: skinDirective
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mediaDirective htmlescapeDirective storeDirective blockDirective layoutDirective Ill start with easier and most commonly used and continue with advanced ones in part two of this article. 1. skinDirective Description: Used to retrieve path of skin folder and its files, theme fallback respected Example: {{skin url=images/image.jpg _theme=blank}} Synonym: $params) Params: url = empty or relative file path _theme = alternative theme, fallbacks if file not exist _package = alternative package _area = alternative area(frontend,adminhtml) _type, _default etc. = nothing useful, somebody please correct me if im wrong 2. mediaDirective Description: Used to retrieve path of root/media folder and its files Example: {{media url=image.jpg}} Synonym: Mage::getBaseUrl(media) . $params['url'] Params: url = empty or relative file path 3. htmlescapeDirective Description: Used to escape special html chars Example: {{htmlescape href=www.inchoo.net>inchoo</a><b>inchoo</ b><i>inchoo</i> allowed_tags=b'}} var=<a Mage::getDesign()->getSkinUrl($params['url'],
Example: {{store url=customer/account _query_a=8}} Synonym: Mage::getUrl($params['url'], $params); Params: url = magento routers url direct_url = normal url, appended to baseurl _query_PARAMNAME = adds query param, for example _query_a=8 adds a=8 to url _fragment = adds fragment, for example #comments _escape = escapes ,,<,> custom = if using magento route url param, every custom param added will be appended like /a/8/b/10 I probably missed something in this last one, but its very late and im tired of poking through Magento To be continued ..
Magento FLIR
Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors. Lets see how it behaves in Magento. 1. Download FLIR from FLIR homepage. I was using latest 1.2 stable for this article because of simplicity, but if you try youll find out that 2.0 beta also works great but requires little more configuration. 2. Unpack FLIR content (cache,fonts,etc.) inside skin/ frontend/default/default/facelift I think it makes perfect sense to put it into skin folder. 3. Open app/design/frontend/yourpackage/yourtheme/ template/page/html/head.phtml and append <script language=javascript src=<?php >getSkinUrl(facelift/flir.js) ?>></script> <script type=text/javascript> document.observe(dom:loaded, function() { FLIR.init({ path: <?php echo $this->getSkinUrl(facelift/) ? > }, new FLIRStyle({ mode: wrap }) ); FLIR.auto(); }); </script> If your php error reporting isnt disabled add error_reporting(0); somewhere on top of config-flir.php. This echo $this-
Synonym: Mage::helper(core)->htmlEscape($params['var'], $params['allowed_tags']) Params: var = string to escape allowed_tags = comma-separated list of allowed tags 4. storeDirective Description: Used to build magento routes and custom urls
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is main config file from which you can define options and custom fonts, so examine it. Refresh your Magento store and you should see the result. flir.js can also be alternatively included from layout files inside head block <reference name=head> <action method=addItem><type>skin_js</ type><name>facelift/flir.js</name></action> </reference> There is nice Quick Start Guide and Documentation available from FLIR homepage, so i wont go in details on some advanced FLIR settings, but here are few examples: //pass selectors as comma separated list FLIR.auto(h5,h4); //pass an array of selectors FLIR.auto( [ 'h4', 'h5' ] ); //replace manually with custom options FLIR.replace( div.box h4 , new FLIRStyle({ mode: wrap , css: {font-family:'arial} }) ); //prototype way $$(div.box h4).each( function(el) { FLIR.replace(el); } ); Cya.
It was made with default Magento theme. Enjoy.
amfPoint - Make your Products Rock in Magento | Inchoo

Something is happening. People from small town in Croatia called Osijek are concerned about Branko Ajzele. They say that he is spending too much time in front of the computer writing some code. We tried to call him many times from the office but got no reply. After a discussion we drew straws to decide who will go to his place to check his condition. When I came to his place and knocked, at first there was an absolute silence. I knocked again After two attempts, Branko opened the door. First thing I noticed was a Magento circle on his forehead and a red eyes. Branko didnt sleep for a very long time. Branko, are you ok?, I asked. Yes, Why? Whats going on? What date it is? You could feel the smell of burning plastic in the air. It was obvious that computer was turned on for a long time. I glanced in the room and I could see the monitor with Magento colored light and some animations on it. What are you working on man? He just stared for a couple of seconds which seemed like an eternity and than he finally spoke To be Continued
Magento product image switcher

I just wrote small javascript animation example for product images and thought someone may find it useful. Its a fast way to replace default zoom functionality for the ones that dont like it. Im actually trying to merge something like this with default zoom, but im not finished yet. Anyway, i left all javascript and styling in media.phtml file, so just download the file and replace it with your own at app/design/frontend/default/yourtheme/template/catalog/ product/view/media.phtml
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Programatically create Magento blocks and inject them into layout

Imagine a scenario where you wish to simply create a view file like custom-note.phtml and show this view file on some new url inside the Magento store. One way to do this is to create a CMS page and call that block from within CMS page. But what if you wish to create and append this block to other areas of Magento layout that are inaccessible from CMS page interface form admin? What if I want to add new div element under the breadcrumbs and append new block under it? magento philosophy is to create block class under the /Block folder of your module, to create xml layout file under the theme /layouts folder (or to modify existing layout file) and so on. Anyway you turn it around you either need to have Block file or add/modify at least the entry to the layout files. All this is OK if you are working on your own store so you have full control over the code. However, what if you are developing a module that will be used on different Magento stores. My prime concern when building a module is to keep the number of necessary module files to a minimum. In code below, you will see how easy it is to call your Core/ Template block to show on any area of Magento layout. Extracted from app/code/local/ActiveCodeline/ CustomOutputs/controllers/IndexController.php file.
How to escape from EAV in Magento? | Inchoo

One of the differences between Magento eCommerce platform and lets say WordPress, when looked from developer point of view, is avoid raw queries approach. For a web application, Magento is massive system. His database, although not so massive but surely breathtaking with around 220 tables forces you to use eye candy EAV model to do even simple things. For instance, if I were to tell you that I want you to retrieve 5 simple products from database that have price in the range of 200-600USD you would most likely spent 1-4 hours trying to work out the query. In the end you would be lucky if you even get the query that wont break on next Magento upgrade. Let me just remind you on some of the things you need to be careful in example above. Your query would have to take in consideration the at least the following states: is my product visibility such that it can be seen in Catalog and search result, is my product enabled or disabled, is is out of stock, which website and store view has it been assigned, is it assigned to only one category and that category is disabled by some chance, does it have special price assigned, does it have promotion rules assigned, does it have content (descriptions) for multilingual site assigned.
All of those and more are questions that one has to take into consideration when doing raw database queries. It makes no sense to create query that fetches product and all its public function indexAction() { appropriate info (price, quantity, description) if that product //Get current layout state is disabled or assigned to category that is disabled. For $this->loadLayout(); instance, if you need featured product functionality and you manually create raw query that extracts one featured $block = $this->getLayout()->createBlock( product to lets say home page. There you create nice block 'Mage_Core_Block_Template', 'my_block_name_here', holding all the necessary info of the product with a link for lets array('template' => 'activecodeline/developer.phtml') say Add to cart or View product. Clicking one of those two ); link would give you most likely 404 if the product is disable $this->getLayout()->getBlock('content')->append($block); or any other condition that enables the product to be shown is disabled.
//Release layout stream... lol... sounds fancy $this->renderLayout(); }
Most IMPORTANT thing to keep in mind here is the error handling. If you assign a invalid block to ->append(), you will not (most likely) see an error but nothing happend situation. Anyhow hope the attached module (extension) will save you some headaches. I know it took me few hours of tracing and testing to get the grip of it. Download ActiveCodeline_CustomOutputs extension. Cheers.
So basically, raw SQL queries in Magento are a no no for most of the time. Too much work and you never know what they will change in future upgrades. Which brings me to this new trend of theirs which I like to call Escape from EAV.
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custom script I wrote. After that i noticed the data in flat tables got rebuild as well. This of course took several hours. Magento EAV model seems OK on paper, but with store that holds large number of products it simply does not work, at least not in way in which their collection objects are built. Changes introduced in form of flat tables in versions 1.3 should, to some extent, improve work with stores that have large numbers of products. However this improvement seems to come in form of copy all data from scattered tables to single flat table. Solutions like these are nightmare when it comes to upgrading the store that already has large number of products in. System is expected to handle part of the job transparently but it failed, leaving the client with corrupted database. So, a word of advice for upgrading an existing Magento store: NEVER do it on live site. Let professional developer transfer live site and database to his dev machine, or make a copy on some sub folder on live site. Magentos extreme out of the box feature rich capabilities, open source philosophy and good marketing have made it extremely popular but be careful, free is such a a loose term. I am really anxious to see the future path of EAV vs Flat model in Magento. EAV, also know as Entity Attribute Value was suppose to bee (or is) the next big thing in OOP. Anyhow, Magento and his way of EAV have two huge downfalls called LACK OF DOCUMENTATION and WHAT WILL THEY CHANGE IN NEXT UPGRADE. The other day I was working on a Magento shop that had 22 000 products. Almost all of them were simple products, just about 600 were grouped. The store was initially installed on Magento 1.2 version. Site was pretty much 95% complete from both graphic and development perspective. Anyhow, Magento version 1.3.1 was released and on client demand we decide to to upgrade. Important thing to keep in mind is that in version 1.3 Magento introduce change in philosophy concerning the EAV model. Altough EAV sounds great (and really is great for most of the time), it can really slow things down with all those JOINS executed on database. So the Magento team decided to do a little flat tabling. Basically we now have massive data duplication in MySQL where data is taken from various tables and copied int one, the flat table. Flat tables were introduced for both Products and categories, in regards to various website and store views. Basically Magento has the power to on the fly create tables and do the magical copying of data from various tables to the flat tables. I assume they were looking for a faster way to assemble Product objects in Magento which in turn should boost the speed of collection object i grew so found about. I can live with duplicated data in database, I mean I am not the one writing them down. But let me get back to real world scenario. As I mentioned, store I have been working on had more than 20 000 products. Due to limitations of both MySQL and PHP failed to do Rebuilt that you can find in System > Configuration > Cache management. This failure caused corrupted data in database. This manifested with empty attributes (attributes not showing up in Layered navigation). I resolved the issue by re saving all of the 20 000 product with
Updating options of configurable product that is already in the cart
< ?php if($this->getProduct()->isConfigurable()){ $_product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($this->g Mage::getBlockSingleton('catalog/product_view_type_configura $_configurable = Mage::getBlockSingleton('catalog/product_vi $_cdata = json_decode($_configurable->getJsonConfig()); $_current = array(); foreach((array)$this->getOptionList() as $_option) { $_current[$_option['label']]=$_option['value']; } foreach($_cdata->attributes as $attribute) { ?> <strong>< ?php echo $attribute->label; ?></strong> <select style="width:150px;" name="cart[<?php echo $_item->g < ?php foreach($attribute->options as $option) { ?> <option <?php echo ($_current[$attribute->label]==$option->l < ?php } ?> </select> < ?php } } else { // THIS IS PLACE WHERE EXISTING CODE from [*] goes } ?>
Now you are done with template and you can style it as you wish as soon as you do few additional steps.
< ?php class YOUR_FIRM_MODULE_NAME_Model_Card { public function update($e)
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{ $_this = $e->cart; $data = $e->info; foreach ($data as $itemId => $itemInfo) { $item = $_this->getQuote()->getItemById($itemId);

$emailTemplateVariables['myvar1'] = 'Branko'; $emailTemplateVariables['myvar2'] = 'Ajzele'; $emailTemplateVariables['myvar3'] = 'ActiveCodeline'; /**
* The best part * Opens the activecodeline_custom_email1.html, throws in th if (!$item) continue; * and returns the 'parsed' content that you can use as body if (!isset($itemInfo['option']) or empty($itemInfo['option'])) continue; */ $processedTemplate = $emailTemplate->getProcessedTemplate($e foreach ($item->getOptions() as $option){ if($option->getCode()=='info_buyRequest'){ $unserialized = unserialize($option->getValue()); $unserialized['super_attribute'] = $itemInfo['option']; $option->setValue(serialize($itemInfo['option'])); }elseif ($option->getCode()=='attributes'){ $option->setValue(serialize($itemInfo['option'])); } } $item->save(); } } } ?>
/* * Or you can send the email directly, * note getProcessedTemplate is called inside send() */ $emailTemplate->send('john@someemail.com','John Doe', $email ...
And here we go again, nothing without xml files -In order for above piece of code to work, you need to add an entry to your config.xml file like shown below.
... <global> <template> <email> <custom_email_template1 module="SampleModule1"> <label>ActiveCodeline custom email module</label> <file>activecodeline_custom_email1.html</file> <type>html</type> </custom_email_template1> </email> </template> </global> ...
P.S. Yes, I know before clicking on update cart, we should have some JavaScript price changer, but this is all I have at this moment since I needed this on card that is autosubmited on dropdown change.
Magento custom emails

Ever wanted to just send the email using the built in email features in Magento? Ever hit the wall trying to do something with Magento? OK, I know the answer to the other one, just had to ask . Anyhow, sending the emails with Magento turned out to be a process of just a few hours of tracing Magento code. I cant wait for smart comments like, few hours, huh its so easy. Yea, thats the beauty of Magento few hours of bashing your head against the wall while you are sipping the 4th cup of coffee until the solution hits you. Interesting do, just when you get the hang of it, Magento gets you this have you tried this attitude . What am I talking about? Scenario: I want to create email template named activecodeline_custom_email1.html, I want to pass few variables to it during runtime, I want to send emails programmaticaly. I dont want to create 56 lines of xml file just to call one template.
And lets not forget the email template itself, app/locale/ en_US/template/email/ activecodeline_custom_email1.html.

<div> <h1>ActiveCodeline custom email example by Branko Ajzele</h1 <p>Hi there {{var myvar1}} {{var myvar2}} from {{var myvar3} </div>
Hope this was helpful. Cheers.
Getting started with building Admin module in Magento
Due to the complexity of Magentos xml files, developers can waste great amount of time on unnecessary things. When I say complexity I say it with purpose. XML files are not so complex by them selves, but due to extreme lack of Here is how. documentation and changes Magento pumps in every new ... major release, people are lost among things that should /* really be sideways. Anyway, in this little article I will show you * Loads the html file named 'custom_email_template1.html' from how to create basic, startup structure for your module to get it * app/locale/en_US/template/email/activecodeline_custom_email1.html shown under Magento Admin main top menu. */
$emailTemplate = Mage::getModel('core/email_template') ->loadDefault('custom_email_template1'); //Create an array of variables to assign to template $emailTemplateVariables = array();
As you can see on the picture below, I am creating a menu item with title ActiveCodeline_SampleModule1.
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</config>
My module is called SampleModule1 and it consists of just a few files. As you go over the provided config.xml file you will see that I used BigLettersSmallLetters style. I do this intentionally because this naming convention is another great pitfall for developers when it comes to constructing xml files. I know I too still struggle with what must be the lowercase question. Here is my example of config.xml file
< ?xml version="1.0"?> <config> <modules> <activecodeline_samplemodule1> <version>0.1.0</version> </activecodeline_samplemodule1> </modules> <global>
My admin controller is extremely simple, just an indexAction() method. However it does tell a lot. Below is a code of indexAction() method.
... public function indexAction() { // "Fetch" display $this->loadLayout();
// "Inject" into display // THe below example will not actualy show anything sinc $this->_addContent($this->getLayout()->createBlock('core // echo "Hello developer..."; // "Output" display $this->renderLayout();
} <helpers> ... <samplemodule1> <class>ActiveCodeline_SampleModule1_Helper</class> are all the files required for this Admin And below </samplemodule1> module to work. </helpers> </global> Note this is only example, DO NOT USE on live site.
example
Cheers <admin> <routers> There are 2 comments <samplemodule1> <use>admin</use> <args> <module>ActiveCodeline_SampleModule1</module> <frontname>samplemodule1</frontname> </args> </samplemodule1> I have been working on a project, in my own time, that involves </routers> </admin> Flex Magento communication. I decided to test Adobes
How to create Magento AMF server extension
<adminhtml> AMF server as an extension in Magento. <menu> <menu1 translate="title" module="SampleModule1"> So, where to we start? <title>ActiveCodeline SampleModule1</title> <sort_order>60</sort_order> The idea is to have special Url which will act as AMF endpoint. <children> Since Magento is built on top of Zend, this is extremely easy <menuitem1 module="SampleModule1"> to do. <title>Menu item 1</title> <action>samplemodule1/example</action> For your module to act as a basic AMF server you need </menuitem1> only 3 files. MyCompany_MyModule.xml that goes under </children> the /app/etc/modules/ folder. Then IndexController.php that </menu1> goes under the /app/code/local/MyCompany/MyModule/ </menu> controllers/IndexController.php. And last but not least <acl> <resources> the config.xml file that goes under the /app/code/local/ <admin> MyCompany/MyModule/etc/ folder. <children> <menu1 translate="title" module="SampleModule1"> I will not go into the details and show you the full <title>ActiveCodeline SampleModule1</title> content of each of those files. Important thing is to focus <sort_order>60</sort_order> on IndexController.php and config.xml files. Inside your <children> IndexController.php file you will actualy hold the code for your <menuitem1> AMF server (Zend_Amf). <title>Menu item 1</title> </menuitem1> Here is an example of indexAction from my </children> IndexController.php file: </menu1> </children> </admin> ... </resources> public function indexAction() </acl> { </adminhtml> //Create AMF server instance
AMF format. In this article I will show you how easy is to create
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$server = new Zend_Amf_Server(); //setProduction(false): return exception info $server->setProduction(false); $server->setClass($class, $class);
develop a feature for Magento than for some other system out there.
Magento block caching

Recently we were working on speeding up parts of client page loading caused by complicated configurable products. To solve the problem we were experimenting with extending core Magento caching capabilities.
//$server->setClassMap("SomeTypedObjectVO", "MyCompany_MyModule_Model_SomeTypedObjectVO"); site which had usual problem of slow $server->setClassMap($className, $class); //Run the AMF server echo $server->handle();
//Just in case so that Magento does not pass anything beyond this point Magento has built in predifined system of block output die; caching. Its block abstract has Zend_Cache caching } capabilities that can be modified for your own needs. Im ...
The above example is the simplest form of Zend AMF server i can think of, but it should be enough to get your AMF server responsive to AMF requests. And to make all of this accessible via Url, we need to add entry to congig.xml file. Below is the partial example of my config.xml file.
... <frontend> <routers> <mymodule> <use>standard</use> <args> <module>MyCompany_MyModule</module> <frontname>myamfserver</frontname> </args> </mymodule> </routers> </frontend> ...
showing here an example of caching whole product view block, however this is just a specific example of how things works, problems are different and requires different approach and solution. I will start with some external reading and example itself. There is great article on Magento Wiki about this topic, along with category cache example on Magento forums. With my Inchoo_BlockCaching.rar example module things should be little easier to understand. Magento block caching depends of three things: cache_lifetime => cache lifetime in seconds cache_tags => cache type identifiers primarly used for deleting right cache at the right time cache_key => cache identyfier You can simply inject this data into construtor of any Magento block
Above piece of code sets access to AMF server on Url like http://server/store/index.php/myamfserver. Thats it.
Top 5 annoying things in Magento

If you ask me, there are two important things that make Magento so attractive. First, its free and open source. Until month ago Magento was fully free, now they have Community and Enterprise editions. But make no mistake, when it comes to out of the box feature list, Community edition will most likely beat any open source cart out there. Rich out of the box features are the second thing that make it so attractive. Large number of files in system which makes it fully impractical to do installations and backup by transferring files over FTP There are more to add to the list, but these are the ones that caught my attention for most of the time. We do every day Magento development, and believe me its quite hard to explain your client that sometimes it takes you 2-4 times more to
protected function _construct() { $this->addData(array( 'cache_lifetime' => 3600, 'cache_tags' => array(Mage_Catalog_Model_Product::CACHE_ 'cache_key' => $this->getProduct()->getId(), )); }
or if you need some conditional approach like i did in this example define equivalent functions
public function getCacheKey(){} public function getCacheLifetime(){} public function getCacheTags(){}
because constructor approach isnt enough in most scenarios. There is a general misassumption about cache_lifetime. If you set it to false, Zend cache will get default value of 7200 seconds!! If you want infinite never expired cache set it to 9999999999, which is Zend_Cache maximum value, or something else big enough. I believe that best way to activate this is to rewrite specific block with our own with caching enabled, like shown in example. You should always try to avoid modifying core files, even copying modified Mage classes to local, because things get really messy on updates.
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<remove name="name_of_the_ol_block"/>
Generated cached files can be found in usual subfolders of / var/cache folder. Two files are generated, first metadata file which contains serialized cache data and second one which is cached html output itself. In my example: mageinternal-metadatasPRODUCT_INFO_STORE +ID_PRODUCT+ID magePRODUCT_INFO_STORE+ID_PRODUCT+ID Note that Blocks HTML output option needs to be enabled in Cache Management for this to work. Many things in Magento can be cached in similar way and there are predefined mechanism waiting for you to use them. Its possible that well see more of this implemented in future Magento versions.
Thats it. You should now be free of product comparison for ever and ever
Magento duplicated content | Inchoo

Magento has several issues with duplicated content. Of course, you dont actually have two versions of the same content in your database, however, in the eyes of search engines, two different URLs serving same content are counted as duplicated content and will cause you lots of problems. The most obvious problem is that your page rank is leaking on different versions of virtually the same landing page. You also might end up with having several versions of the same content indexed which is bad in so many ways. First duplicated content problem in Magento occurs when you are listing a product in multiple categories. Magento will create several URLs that actually contain the same content such as: The easiest way to avoid this problem is to simply turn of the category based URLs in Magento admin panel. This way you will always serve exactly the same URL no matter which direction user took to find your product and it will be example.com/product_name.html. However, you might actually want to have category based URLs for both usability and SEO reasons. Dont worry, there is a solution for you here, it just involves a little more work to do. What you need to do is put a rel cannonical on the URLs with category base pointing back to the original product URL. This probably sounds like some sort of voodoo but if you reed about rel canonical it will be piece of cake.
Removing Product Comparison in Magento

As many things in Magento, removing product comparison is not available thru the admin interface. Thus, leaving us with the only option of getting down and dirty with theme files editing. This guide is pretty straightforward and is based on the Magento ver. 1.3.1.1 Before beginning of this procedure please Go to: System-> Cache Management and disable cache. You can turn it on after youre done. Step 1 reports.xml Open: app/design/frontend/deafult/Your Theme name/ layout/reports.xml and delete the following lines:
This issue is also easily fixed by use of rel canonical. Simply put a rel cannonical on all of the products with SID in URL, pointing back name="right.reports.product.viewed" template="r <block type="reports/product_viewed" before="right.permanent.callout"to the products original URL. Step 2 catalog.xml Open app/design/frontend/deafult/Your Theme layout/catalog.xml and delete the following line: name/
<block type="reports/product_compared" before="right.permanent.callout" name="right.reports.product.compared" templat
<block type="core/template" before="cart_sidebar" name="catalog.compare.sidebar" template="catalog/product/compare/si
Save the files and refresh the page you were checking. Product comparison should not be there but if you click on any of the products you ll see that the Add to compare text link is still there. The way to remove it: Step 3 addto.phtml Open up app/design/frontend/default/Your Theme name/ template/catalog/product/view/addto.phtml and delete the following line:
< ?php if($_compareUrl=$this->helper('catalog/product_compare')->getAddUrl($_product) ): ?> <li><span class="pipe">|</span> <a href="<?php echo $_compareUrl ?>">< ?php echo $this->__('Add to Compare') ?></a></ < ?php endif; ?>
Oh, of course theif you dont want to actually delete the code can always use the following:

Inchoo's Magento Posts: Boost The Speed of Your Magento

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September 8th, 2009

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