inchoo's magento posts

Go online to create your own zines or read what others have already published.. September 8th, 2009 Published by: inchooALTER TABLE `customer_entity_decimal` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABL

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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 Designer’s 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

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 column…etc

which serve to create the visual structure for a store page Our

goal is to create a new structural block called “newreference”

Step 1: Name the structural block

Open the file layout/page.xml in your active theme folder

Inside you will find lines like:

Let’s mimic this and add a new line somewhere inside the sameblock tag

Good Now we told Magento that new structural block existswith the name “newreference” Magento still doesn’t knowwhat to do with it

Step 2: Tell Magento where to place it

We now need to point Magento where it should output thisnew structural block Let’s go to template/page folder in ouractive theme folder You will notice different layouts there

Let’s assume we want the new structural block to appear only

on pages that use 2-column layout with right sidebar In thatcase we should open 2columns-right.phtml file

www.besthosting4magento.com

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Created using zinepal.com Go online to create your own zines or read what others have already published. 2

Let’s assume we wish the “newreference” block to be placed

below 2 columns, but above the footer In this case, our

updated file could look like this:

<! end right ></div>

</div>

<! end middle >

Step 3: Populating structural block

We have the block properly placed, but unfortunately nothing

is new on the frontsite Let’s populate the new block with

something We will put new products block there as an

example Go to appropriate layout XML file and add this block

to appropriate place

</reference>

That’s it I hope it will help someone

There are 15 comments

How to delete orders in Magento? |

Inchoo

You got a Magento project to develop, you created a Magento

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 doesn’t 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,

ALTER TABLE `sales_order` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `sales_order_datetime` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `sales_order_decimal` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_datetime` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_decimal` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_int` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_text` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_varchar` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_int` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `sales_order_text` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `sales_order_varchar` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote_address` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote_address_item` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote_item` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote_item_option` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; 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;

ALTER TABLE `report_event` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

reset customers TRUNCATE `customer_address_entity`;

ALTER TABLE `customer_address_entity` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `customer_address_entity_datetime` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_address_entity_decimal` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_address_entity_int` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_address_entity_text` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_address_entity_varchar` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_entity` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `customer_entity_datetime` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

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ALTER TABLE `customer_entity_decimal` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `customer_entity_int` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `customer_entity_text` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `customer_entity_varchar` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `log_customer` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `log_visitor` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

ALTER TABLE `log_visitor_info` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

Reset all ID counters

TRUNCATE `eav_entity_store`;

ALTER TABLE `eav_entity_store` AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1;

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

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 id’s

from custom field of some post inside your WordPress

Place this code inside one of your templates, like single.php

<td>< ?php _e('Starting at') ?> $ < ?php echo floatval($item->price) ?></td>

</tr>

< ?php endforeach; ?>

</table>

< ?php endif; ?>

Hope some of you find this useful Especially those who refuse

to use Web Services for connecting different systems

Download connect2MAGE WordPress plugin

There are 6 comments Custom checkout cart - How to send email after successful checkout in Magento | Inchoo

Recently I have been working on a custom checkout page forone of our clients in Sweden I had some trouble figuring outhow to send default Magento order email with all of the orderinfo After an hour or so of studying Magento core code, here

is the solution on how to send email after successful order hasbeen made

Not sure how useful this alone will be for you, so I’ll throw alittle advice along the way When trying to figure how to reuseMagento code, separate some time to study the Model classeswith more detail Then “tapping into” and reusing some ofthem 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, butalso have a blog to empower your business? In this case,you probably know that Magento doesn’t have some articlemanager in the box Many clients seek for supplementarysolution like Wordpress to accomplish this goal Ok, so youcreated a blog on same or different domain and you wouldlike those articles to appear somewhere in Magento (probablysidebar) This article will explain how to do it

Let’s create a file called latest_news.phtml

in app/design/frontend/default/[your_theme]/template/

callouts/latest_news.phtmlNow we will create a PHP block that will display the list

of articles from RSS feed We will use Inchoo RSS fordemonstration purposes In your scenario, replace it with yourown valid RSS URL

< ?php $channel = new Zend_Feed_Rss('http://feeds.feedburner.com/Inchoo'); ?>

<h2>< ?php echo $this-> ('Latest News') ?></h2>

</div>

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< ?php foreach ($channel as $item): ?>

<li><a href="<?php echo $item->link; ?>">< ?php echo $item->title; ?></a></li>

Now, we should decide where to place it I assume you already

know how Magento blocks and references work Let’s 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

That’s it You should be able to see the list of articles from RSS

feed with the URLs Hope this will help someone

Advanced search in Magento and how to

use it in your own way

It’s been a while since my last post I’ve 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 (don’t they all) store

set When I say specific, i don’t 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

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 it’s 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:

• use the http://somestore.domain/catalogsearch/partnumber as a link

• show only custom_partnumber field on the search formFirst, we have to see where does the /advanced come from.Lets open our template folder at

app\design\frontend\default\default\template

\catalogsearch\

there you will see the /advanced folder Make a copy of thatentire folder, in the same location, and name it to somethinglike /custom

Now your /custom folder should have 2 files: form.phtml andresult.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/2columns- right.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”>

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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() as

$_attribute): ?>

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

And you are done Now you have somewhat more custom url,

and only one custom field displayed on that url

This might not be the best method of reusing already writtencode, however I hope it’s any eye opener to somewhat moreelegant aproach

customers would ideally buy instead of the product they’re

viewing They might be better quality, produce a higher profitmargin, be more popular, etc These appear on the productinfo 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 happenautomatically after adding a product, or not), the cross-sellsblock displays a selection of items marked as cross-sells to theitems already in the cart They’re a bit like impulse buys – likemagazines and candy at the cash registers in grocery stores

Upsells

This is the example of the Up-sell Ideally, the visitor issupposed to analyze those products as they should be relevant

to the one that is just loaded

There are 2 comments File upload in Magento

Now, Magento already have frontend and admin part of fileupload option implemented in themes Since backend part isstill missing, understand that this still doesn’t work, however,

if you’re interested how it looks, read on

We are coding module of similar functionality for one of ourclients as we speak, but we have our fingers crossed to see thisoption in next Magento version!

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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 I’d 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 I’m saying it again; Magento is a great peace of

full OOP power of PHP It’s architecture is something not yet

widely seen in CMS solutions

One of the architectural goodies of Magento is it’s 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?

Let’s 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? Wouldn’t

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 object’s 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 it’s

footprint is rather small, I’ll 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 I’m 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 wewould retrieve an array with some useful data in it Donot get confused with me mentioning the view.phmtl file,it’s just he file i like to use to test the code UsingMage::getSingleton(’core/session) would retrieve us somemore data You get the picture Test, test, test… What’s greatabout the whole thing is that naming in Magento is perfectlylogical 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 MagentoCMS is determining the context of $this If you are about

to do any advanced stuff with your template, besides layoutchanges, you need to get familiar with Magento’s objects(classes)

Let’s have a look at the /app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/product/view.phtml file If youopen this file and execute var_dump($this) your browser willreturn empty page after a short period of delay By page I mean

on the product view page; the one you see when you click onMagetno product Experienced users will open PHP error logand notice the error message caused by var_dump() Errormessage:

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 otherdebugger with systems like Magento

Why is PHP throwing errors then? If you google out the

error PHP has thrown at you, you’ll see that PHP 5.2has memory limit Follow the link http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.memory-limit to see how andwhat exactly

Google search gave me some useful results trying to solve myproblems I found Krumo at http://krumo.sourceforge.net/.It’s a PHP debugging tool, replacement for print_r() andvar_dump() After setting up Krumo and running it onMagento it gave me exactly what I wanted It gave me theobject type of the dumped file; in this case it gave me objecttype of $this

If you’re using an IDE studio with code completion supportlike NuSphere PhpED, ZendStudio or NetBeans and youdecide to do something like $this-> you won’t get any methodslisted I haven’t yet seen the IDE that can perform this kind ofsmart 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, let’s saycanEmailToFriend();

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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 you’re 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 I’m 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

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 Let’s 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, it’s most definitely the fastest way (and I doubt most of

your clients would prefer any other , especially if it’s some

minor modification)

Simple random banner rotator in

Magento using static blocks

This is my first post here and I’ll 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 I’ll 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, I’ll show you how to

put it below the content on cms pages

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?

What is “Best Value” filed?

When you go to Category page in Magento administration, youwill see “Category Products” tab From there, you will see thelist of products that are associated to this category The lastcolumn 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

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 we’ll modify it, make acopy 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') );

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 theselection 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 andturns it into a very powerful online catalog You won’t noticethe Shopping Cart or checkout process yet Even withoutthose, this site shows exactly what Pebblehill has to offer: themost popular styles of custom upholstered furniture

You can customize the furniture collection to express yourown unique style made with the highest quality materials andcraftsmanship available

Pebble Hill Designs’ parsons chairs are “American made” withpride in Georgia The quality speaks for itself Your productsare pre-assembled and ready for use when you receive them

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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

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/

Magento part of the site can be viewed if you click at Shop byVehicle or Shop by Brand tabs from the main menu, but youwill notice that some blocks seamlessly integrate between twosolutions

We developed this site as the Surgeworks team The designwas created by one of out top designers, Rafael Torales Wehope you enjoy it and feel free to post your comments

There are 6 comments The Best Shopping Cart :: Trend analysis

of osCommerce, Magento, ZenCart and CRE Loaded | Inchoo

If you try to ask this question on some forum or newsgroup,you will surely get many replies Everyone will present youhis favorite My first developed online store was created withstandard osCommerce platform After three or four projects,

I started to work with CRE Loaded and used it frequently foryears Although it was also an osCommerce fork, it had manyadvantages I switched to Magento™ early this year and this

is my final choice

Google™ Trends is a great tool to check some platformspopularity by comparing it to the competition For my shortanalysis, I compared:

As you can see, osCommerce still remains the most populareCommerce platform However, you can notice that this

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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 won’t be

one of them.:)

• More experienced PHP developers will first read

Magento Designers Guide before they try to style

Magento, but others won’t and that’s 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,

don’t 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

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 It’s 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 you’re done There is

also tutorial about this on Magento Wiki However i don’t likeapproach of duplicating and overriding Mage files from /local,

if it can be avoided, so i decided to write this small and usefulexample of adding or overriding default Magento settingsthrough 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 usedxml 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 Željko Prša made a nice little post

on Adding a new language in Magento so I figure I’ll jump with

a little Drupal to Magento integration trick concerning linkissues and multilingual sites Here is a piece of code you canuse in your Drupal templates to do the proper switching fromDrupal site to Magento while keeping the selected language ofsite Note, this tweak assumes you have the desired languagesetup on both Drupal and Magento side

This part goes to some of your Drupal theme file

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 toShop from Drupal to Magento should now activate the properlanguage, the same one you have active on Drupal side

There are 1 comments Adding a new language in Magento

As anything in Magento adding a new language is somethingthat requires a certain procedure which we will explain rightnow and for future reference

• 3 Now go to: Configuration -> Current ConfigurationScope (Select your language from the dropdown) and onthe right side under “Locale options” choose the desiredlanguage

That’s it, now when you go to the frontend of the site, you’llnotice a dropdown menu allowing the language switching

Access denied in Magento admin

Some of you may encountered this problem You install newMagento extension through downloader, try to access itsconfiguration settings and Magento throws “Access denied”

page at you Although you’re administrator of the system

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So what happened here? Magento just doesn’t have stored

privileges for this new extension

First just try to logout and login again If that doesn’t work,

you need to reset admin privileges

Navigate to System->Permissions->Roles and click

Administrators role

Check your Role Resources settings just in case, Resource

Access dropdown should be already set to All for

administrators

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

If you worked with osCommerce, Zen Cart, CRE Loaded or anysimilar eCommerce platform before, you might find Magentodatabase structure quite confusing when you see it for the firsttime I advise you not to rush too much figuring out what

is what by glancing through database Try to spend first fewhours getting familiar with some background For purposes

of flexibility, the Magento database heavily utilizes an Attribute-Value (EAV) data model As is often the case, thecost of flexibility is complexity Is there something in Magentothat is simple from developers point of view?

Entity-Data manipulation in Magento is often more knowledgedemanding than that typical use of traditional relationaltables Therefore, an understanding of EAV principles andhow they have been modeled into Magento it is HIGHLYrecommended before making changes to the Magentodata or the Magento schema (Wikipedia: Entity-attribute-value_model) Varien has simplified the identification of EAVrelated tables with consistent naming conventions Core EAVtables are prefixed with “EAV_” Diagrams in this post contain

a section labeled “EAV” which displays Magento’s core EAVtables and thier relationships to non-EAV tables

Database diagrams and documents found in this post areintended to mirror the database schema as defined by Varien.Table relationships depicted in the diagrams represent onlythose relationships explicitly defined as Foreign Keys in theMagento database Additional informal/undiagrammed tablerelationships may also exist, so when modifying the schema

or directly manipulating data it is important to identify andevaluate possible changes to these tables as well (and thetables they relate to, and the tables they relate to…)

The author of Database Diagram is Gordon Goodwin, ITConsultant You can see his info in the PDF

There are 12 comments Magento + Net Framework, simple order preview app

For those of you who are into kinky stuff I made a simple,more of a proof of concept, application that sits in Widnowstaskbar and shows the order info in balloon popup Took melittle more than half of hour to get this working Almost forgothow 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 It’s really, really

simple Below is the screenshot of this little app for you to see

what I’m 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 That’s 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 it’s 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

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 you’re selling

chef’s 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

Technically, we create a simple products and after that agrouped products When we edit the grouped product, we willassociate simple products to it.It works very fine, but some ofyou might have issue if a simple product has custom options

If that’s the case, and if costum options are set as required(default way), the simple product will not be associative to thegrouped product Let’s see what needs to be changed in thatcase

On Magento site, there is a nice tutorial how to create agrouped product Please read it first to become familiar withthe process If you don’t have to assign simple products withcustom options to a grouped product, that tutorial will beenough

Manually create Google Sitemap in Magento | Inchoo

Most of you probably know this, but let’s define what thesitemaps are Sitemaps are a simple way for site creators togive search engines the information about pages on their sitethat are available for public Basically, those are just 1 or moreXML files that lists URLs for a site along with additional metainformatio about each URL (like last update, how often itchanges, its importance relevant to other pages) With this inmind, search engines can be more clever while crawling thesite Click here see how sitemap of this site looks like

You will hear the term Google Sitemap a lot, but XML Schemafor the Sitemap protocol is not related only to Google at all Itcan be used in many places, but the most important ones areGoogle 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

Let’s 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

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

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, ORM’s, 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

One of the things that caught my eye and made mewonder about the consequences is the Observer and overridefunctionality that probably most of the serious custom madeMagento modules will utilize Utilizing Observers enables you

to observe and execute some action inside the “customer workflow” or even some admin stuff Such functionality is heavilyknown is systems like WordPress and it’s called “hooks”.Besides hooking, another useful an very powerful featurewhich is actually related more to the OOP concept itself is theoverriding Personally i find the combination of observers andoverrides to be the coolest and most powerful stuff in Magentomodule development

So where is the issue? As of time of this writing, thelatest Magento version is 1.3.1 Let’s 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 overridefunctionality like

In the above code, we override the prepareForCart method to

to some custom stuff for us This peace of code would workperfectly fine in version 1.2.1.2, but when client decides toupgrade the shop to 1.3.1 or newer he would get the error like

To me, stuff like this is a serious downside towards buildingadvanced modules Changing core files and core functionalitycan have serious impact on custom made modules eachMagento upgrade Therefore, one should keep an eye open

on what modules he will throw into the shop Personally Iconsider online stores very serious and have strong feelingsabout each store owner having somewhat of dedicateddeveloper that will be in charge even for stuff like adding newmodules

Just consider the financial loss for a store owner of any moreserious web shop if he decides to download the and installmodule himself just to realize that for incompatibility reasonsthis new module made his shop fully nonfunctional

How to transfer large Magento database from live to development server and other way round

I have been involved in Magento development for almost ayear now God knows I had (and still have) my moments ofpain with it If you are in professional, everyday, PHPdevelopment that focuses mainly on Magento then your lifeprobably isn’t all flowers and bees Magento is extremely richeCommerce platform, but its main downside IMHO is its sizeand code complexity If you download Magento via SVN, youwill sound find out it has around 11 600 and more files This

is no small figure Transferring that much of files over theFTP can be a real night mare Luckily we have SSH and tarcommand to handle this really neat

But what about database Today I worked on database withmore than 20 000 products in store and with extremelylarge number of categories What seemed like easy database

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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 – 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 it’s “connection” to Magento core Modules like this,

Affiliates for all, are modules I consider loosely related to core.They are in one or another way connected to Magento but theyare self standing, independent, applications

Installation of Affiliate module is a trivial task It mostlycomes down to extracting downloaded archive file to a webaccessible directory (to your server, hosting) and configuringthe config.inc file (For security reasons, try renamingthe config.inc to config.inc.php, plus changing the /lib/bootstrap.php on line 23 to include config.inc.php) Afterimporting affiliates.sql into the database our installation isdone

To configure Magento part, one needs to copy required filesform /carts directory of Affiliate module and then (turn offCache) go to System > Configuration and set the requiredoptions After that you can go back to your Affiliate ForAll application, upload some banners and set their url links

to point to your Magento shop When you test banner thelinks (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 entirecheckout process, order info gets recorded to Affiliate For Allapplication

If you wish to play with Affiliate For All without installing it,you can check out the demo (just use “Admin” both for userand password)

There are 2 comments New Magento theme tutorial | Inchoo

There are many new Magento stores that are publishedeach day If you are with Magento for a longer time, youwill also notice that many of those look similar to default

or modern Magento theme Creating an totally unique andcustom one can be a difficult process, easpecially taking intoconsideration number of different interfaces we have This iswhy many Magento developers choose to use the CSS fromone of mendioned Magento themes that come with defaultinstallation and style those up This is not a bad choice at all

as it speeds up the process and those default themes are verygood 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 MagentoDesigner’s Guide, where the Magento design terminology isexplained in this PDF document

Blank Theme is a sample skeleton theme for Magento designerand a perfect way to start a new one Let’s be honest, we willrarely 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 3columns, 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 doesn’tcome with default installation, so you will have to use MagentoConnect to get it

theme

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http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/518/blank-September 8th, 2009 Published by: inchoo

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 I’m sure that the CSS

wizards will find this invaluable

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 it’s 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 that’s not the case, then you will how to do the things the

manual way

Create a Color Switcher in Magento

Magento comes packed with a lot of options But no matterhow many options you put into some product you can nevercover all of them One of such options (for now) is a colorswitcher in Magento To be more precise, an image switcherbased on color selection

Recently I’ve made a screencast on my site on this subject,with somewhat different title The idea is to have a dropdownbox from which you choose a color and based on the colorselection product image changes All of this is to be based onsome simple javascript (in my case, jQuery)

Before we continue, you might want to see color switcher inaction We used this solution on our Kapitol Reef project.First you need to upload some images to your product andgive them some meaningful names like Red, Blue, Greendepending on your product color When I say give themname, I mean on label values Same goes for creating customattribute You create a dropdown selection box and create thesame amount of dropdown options as you have images, givingthem the same name Red, Green, Blue… and so on Here aresome images for you to see what I’m talking about:

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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 impressiveresults for this Hope you find it useful

You can see complete screencast at:

http://activecodeline.com/wp-content/uploads/videos/MagentoProductColorChooser.swf

There are 28 comments Magento’s Onepage Checkout in a nutshell

For the last two days I’ve been working on a custom checkoutpage for one of our clients Basicaly a page can be shown

in Magento using simple Core_Template type Basically allcode is set inside the phtml file so it can be shown on everypossible page or block, meaning it’s object independent, noinheritance Something you can call from with your layout fileslike

To complete my work, I had two mayor requirements Onewas to manage my way around programmable adding a simpleproducts to cart, plus their quantity and other was to docheckout with items in cart Checkout was to be made withpredefined payment method as well as shipping method Afterreviewing a lot of Magento’s code involved in checkout processand process of adding products to cart and so on I’ve puttogether 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 thecode 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 submitbutton or submit input field To extract addresses you can usesomething like

Magento official documentation download

We were among a few of the studios to receive the early release

of the Magento documentation before it’s official release date

We broke the embargo ’cause we just didn’t have the heart

to keep it to our selves, we all now how painful it is to workwithout it

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Designer's Guide to Magento PDF

download | Inchoo

After many developed CRE Loaded’s 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 Designer’s guide

I’m the type of guy who likes to have documents nice&clean,

so I tried to print it but print was a mess That’s 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

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

doesn’t need to be whole theme of course, just the files you’re

changing

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 doesn’t disturb the looks of your site

3 Finally, since you do not need Whishlist anymore it is wise to

disable it’s respective module output thru the admin interface

(Go to: System -> Configuration ->Advanced->Advanced and

set disable “Mage_Whishlist” )

That’s it Your whish is Magento’s command

There are 4 comments Magento Installation with SVN or Wget Unix command | Inchoo

Those of you who know what SVN is, feel free to skip thisarticle Those of you who are not familiar with SVN, this is

a must-read If you use standard FTP to upload all Magentofiles, you may find this process very time consuming Magento1.1.8 has over 6.700 files in over 2.200 folders FTPing cansometimes take few hours on some servers Let’s look atalternatives

Both alternatives require SSH access to the server I’m awarethat some low quality webhosting providers do not provideyou with SSH info immediately If you don’t have SSH info,ask webhosting support If they don’t give it to you, changewebhosting provider Make it a rule, you’ll make your lifemuch easier

Get yourself familiar with basic UNIX commands first

Alternative 1: SVN

In the Downloads tab on Magento website, you will notice SVNpage link:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/svnYou can see how short this page is You have 2 commandsyou can run at SVN You can chack latest work in progress oryou can checkout latest stable version If you are starting todevelop a real project, you will probably want a stable version.Let’s 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 onthe server It will place the files in trunk folder I will assumetwo things:

1 You will want the clean code

2 You will want to specify the folder where you wishMagento to be installed

If those are correct assumptions, you will want to run acommand similar to this one:

svn export force http://svn.magentocommerce.com/source/branches/1.1shop

• svn – This is the command

• export - The difference with checkout is that with anexport, you get a clean copy of the code, and none ofthe subversion metadata, so it can’t be used to svn up ormake further changes

• –force – you will overwrite all of the folders and files ifthey exist

• http://svn.magentocommerce.com/source/branches/1.1 - this is SVN URL Leave itintact

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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

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

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 don’t cut it You

need your own logo, email data and custom verbiage to be

consistent with the image of your company

Here how it’s done :

1 Creating custom transactional e-mails via Admin

a) In the admin panel of your magento installation go to:

System->Transactional Emails

You’ll be presented with a list of default emails You’ll 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

E-mail, name of the company etc You’ll need to upload the logo

of your company in the images folder of the skin you’re 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

After you’re done with setting your new templates save theconfiguration by clicking on the “Save config”

That’s it Wise thing to do now would be to check how theemails look when received so make a test purchase to verifyeverything is the way it should be

There are 3 comments Bestseller products in Magento

Bestseller or best selling product is one of the features peopletend to ask for when it comes to Magento™

There are multiple ways to implement this feature

In this example, I’m not using controller or model directories

at all; I’m going to show you how to implement this featureusing only one file: the View

Basically, what you need to do is to create the directory insideyour template directory and place the bestseller.phtml file in

it In my example, I’m using the custom-created directory /inchoo All of the screenshots provided here are based on thatdirectory structure

Adding this feature to your store is a matter of two simplesteps:

• 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 theMagento, CMS > Manage Pages > Home Then add thefollowing to the content area:

{{block type=”core/template” template=”inchoo/bestseller.phtml”}}

Notice the type attribute I used core/template which meansyou can place this code anywhere in your site and it will work.Code does not inherit any collection objects from controllerssince 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 fileyou 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” show_total=”12″

template=”inchoo/bestseller.phtml”}}

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

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 what’s 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 designer’s 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:

• Support for Downloadable Products (to see this newproduct type in action visit the Magento Demo Store Weadded 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 excludeattributes used on the search results page

• Improved site search to utilize MySQL fulltext search

• Added support for fixed-taxes on product level for suchtaxes as “State Environmental Fee” in the USA and

“WEEE/DEEE” in the EU

• Upgraded Zend Framework to the latest stable version1.7.2

• Added a Layered Navigation Cache for improvedperformance of large catalogs (currently in beta and isNOT recommended for production use)

If you need to upgrade existing Magento version through theMagento Connect Manager to 1.2.0.1, follow this steps:

• Do NOT use your live or production site We suggestmaking 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 upgradeshould start

• After upgrade is complete click on the ‘Refresh’ button

• Copy your original index.php and htaccess files back (ifneeded)

• Log into your admin and rebuild search index

• You should now have Magento 1.2.0 installed

Happy Magentizing

There are 1 comments Listing out products on sale in Magento | Inchoo

One of my recent articles was on the subject of sorting “OnSale” product in Magento The following is a cleaner and moreadvanced look at how—with few tricks and smart moves—youcan reuse existing Magento code and modify it to suit yourneeds

Product can be “on sale” in two ways:

1 when an item has a special price assigned to it on theindividual level, or

2 when a special promotion “covers” the item

It is important to remember that you don’t have to set up thespecial 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 I’m 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 Let’s 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(>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 somefeedback or additional suggestions

There are 3 comments Magento

After many weeks of work, our 1st Magento project hitthe Web: TeraFlex Suspensions As the purpose of the site

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in not primarily selling, but also branding and community

development, we decided to use Wordpress and Magento

combination to accomplish the client’s goals

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

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 isn’t 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

I know that this is not some breakthrough article, but I willcertanly create contact CMS page on all of my future Magentoprojects

Custom price filter in Magento

Quite a few people have asked me for a price filter functionalitythat comes with Magento Mostly, the questions are same:How does one put the price filter anywhere on the page? Howdoes one set it’s on price ranges in that filter? What definesdefault price ranges Is it possible to set price filter for all myproducts instead of just single category? Lot of questions Theanswer might be simpler then you might think

There are two ways to approach this problem Head troughwall or stop and think approach.Default Magento price filterworks with algoritam which functions on the following logic

1 Find the lowest and highest price in the range of filteredproducts

2 Find what power of 10 these are in

3 If there’s 2 or less ranges available we go one powerdown

So one approach would to be to somehow override defaultprice filter logic by rewriting it and embedding some new logic

of yours I call this one head trough wall I’m not implyingthat this is wrong approach, on the contrary this is the genericsolution However it does require some more time to come upwith

Second solution is by far more easier It involves using simpleHTML (could use it in your static blocks)

If one wishes to use the price range filter to filter trough entireproduct collection he can simply create a subcategory underthe Default root category and add all of the products to it Then

we write some static html code with urls made to fire up theprice filter

Let’s look at the default Magento sample data It gies you thefollowing category layout

Root Catalog (6)

• Furniture (6)

• Living Room (4)

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• 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

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=…”

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

Most of this is quite selfexplanaory so, for those who needthis kind of functionality across some special pages, hope youintegrate it withouth any problems

There are 4 comments Magentique - Magento Showcase Launched | Inchoo

We launched one internal project today: magentique.com Forthe last few months we were working almost exlusively onMagento projects As many of you, we were also wonderingwhat sites are developed with it There are very little galleriesthat give the list of Magento powered stores and that’s howthis idea was created We present you Magentique and hopeyou like it

Curiosity about this project is that we used Magento to develop

it You’ll not see a shopping cart or Add to Cart buttons, butMagento was the tool we used Take a look at the gallery,comment the sites you like Subscribe to RSS Share it withyou friends Also, we would welcome your submissions of newstores you own, you created or just the ones you like

Hi,

I like your work with Magento, and i see that y’re notaffraid of experimenting My question is relative to http://www.raspberrykids.com I like the layout, especially folder tabwith ‘Description’, ‘Tags’ etc I didnt find such a feature inMagento 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 notonly our portfolio

Regarding blog topics, we try to write about the things we work

on However, we can not cover all Magento possibilities Hopeyou 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

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 it’s done Magento uses Prototype library (which,

personlay, I’m 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>" />

<input id="lastname" name="lastname" class="<em/><strong>input-text required-entry</strong>" />

<label for="useremail">< ?php echo $this-> ('Email') ?> <span class="required">*</span></label><br />

<input type="text" name="useremail" id="useremail" class="<em/><strong>input-text required-entry validate-email</strong>" />

<input type="submit" name="submit" value="<?php echo $this-/> ('Submit') ?>" />

</form>< ?php /* END OF my-custom-form */?>

You will notice all of the input fields have one common

class name, required-entry I’m not gonna go over all of the

available class names here To find available class names, trygoing to One page checkout page, where you have checkoutform, 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 thatlittle piece of JavaScript below the form Remember to pass

form id into the new VarienForm object.

Basically thats it Constructing the form this way, automaticalymakes your form reuse already existing validation code, theone that the rest of the shop is using

There are 5 comments CSRF Attack Prevention

If you login to your Magento admin today, you are welcomedwith message box that says:

CSRF Attack Prevention Read details !Yesterday Magento team acknowledged CSRF vulnerabilityand 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 Ishiding vulnerability new way of fixing it? Especially sincesome users of French Magento forums found similar problem

in downloader (Magento connect manager) I can confirm thiscouse i tested it myself The most funny part was that Magentocached my get request so i couldn’t get rid of my test alert box

Few fast tips for Magento admins:

1 Follow official Magento news, forums, updates

2 Don’t click suspicious links These kind of attacks areusually done through malformed links that admin clicksthrough mail, comment, or any other source

3 Clear “saved passwords” from browsers Since mostweb browsers offer to remember passwords, and thenautocomplete them, these kind of attack could easily stole yourpassword

Tiêu đề	Inchoo's Magento Posts
Tác giả	Inchoo
Chuyên ngành	Ecommerce Design and Development
Thể loại	Blog Posts Collection
Năm xuất bản	2009

Định dạng
Số trang	45
Dung lượng	1,86 MB