Create a new Magento theme

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Magento @ 10th OCT 2008

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.

Making use of Magento getSingleton method

Posted by Branko Ajzele under Magento @ 9th OCT 2008

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.

Is current Wordpress page in the hierarchy of some other?

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Wordpress @ 1st OCT 2008

This topic could be interested for those of you who deal with Wordpress theme creations. If you are not one of them, you will not find this interesting at all. Developing a complex Wordpress site with many sections with pages may be limited with Wordpress standard content structure. Posts are in categories. Categories can have subcategories and pages can have subpages. There are some default functions that help you in identification of which element is child and which is parent. But when we need something more advanced, things get complicated.

Create a Color Switcher in Magento

Posted by Branko Ajzele under Magento @ 30th SEP 2008

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 I’ve 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).

UPS API Quest

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Tools @ 30th 2008

I got one fairly simple request to develop a custom shipping calculation for Magento that will use some special calculation using UPS API. Right now, Magento only calculates weight and the client needs something more advanced. I worked on similar stuff before, so I guessed this will not be much different. First step was to find an API for UPS. Well, this post is all about the search for API. I’ll update it when I manage to find it.

Free Flash Graphs Tool

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Tools @ 21st SEP 2008

It is very common in the process of building custom web application that we need to produce some sort of visual reports. Those reports have to quickly display tabluar data in human more readable format - graphs. Although  there is a way to create them yourself in PHP using some image functions, you’ll have to spend a lot of time to make the chart look superb. This is where Open Flash Chart project jumps in.

WordPress Navigation Management

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Wordpress @ 19th SEP 2008

While searching for new version of Wordpress breadcrumbs plugin, I stumbed upon something I needed for a long time. One of the issues I had with using Wordpress as CMS was its frontsite navigation customization possibilities. Yes, we have default wp_list_pages() function with some options, and yes,  we have wp_list_cats() function with options on its own. But, what if I wanted to make sidebar navigation to be a combination of pages and categories?  This was the problem where I used a lot of custom coding in sidebar.php or header.php file. I found an easier methond with NAVT, Wordpress Navigation List Plugin.

Figuring out Magento object context

Posted by Branko Ajzele under Magento, Tools @ 10th SEP 2008

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 Magento’s objects (classes).

Let’s 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().

Manual creation of Google Sitemap in Magento

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Magento @ 9th SEP 2008

Most of you probably know this, but let’s 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.

Website Launch Flowchart

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Tools @ 4th SEP 2008

Did you ever wonder what does it take to build a successful website? Bob Misita from Virante helps us visualize the process. He made a flowchart of 40 steps that need to be completed before actual website launch. Although the list is quite comprehensive, this steps really occur even in medium sized projects.

I hope this will help all of you who want to build a self-money-generation sites with the deadline of 3 weeks. Look at the flowchart, analyze it and don’t start the development until you planned at least 80% of this boxes.