How to track internal site search with Google Analytics?

Posted by Toni Anicic under Online Marketing @ 31st OCT 2008

Did you know that you can actually track what your visitors are searching for inside your website? We are going to explain you how it’s done via Google’s Analytics tool. It is possible to track your internal site searches if your internal search engine passes the search term in the query string as Google Analytics tracks everything entered in location bar of user’s browser.

Revolution 2 is launched

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Wordpress @ 30th OCT 2008

Something wonderful happened today. Brian Gardner, the creator of the notorious premium Revolution themes for Wordpress, just released a new set of open-source Wordpress Themes under the name of Revolution Two. All of the themes on the new site will be made available under the open source/GPL license.

Harvest CO-OP review

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Tools @ 29th OCT 2008

Do you work in a larger team? When a new project comes, it can be quite hard to determine what human resources are available. It is very hard to know what each one of 30 team members has on its queue list. This simple CO-OP online tool makes availability communication issues much easier and faster. We started using it in Surgeworks couple of days ago and it was extremely helpful. Some might have a feeling like they are in online Big Brother, but it is an useful tool.

Kapitol Reef :: Magento store with 1 product

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Magento, Wordpress @ 28th OCT 2008

Can online store have only one product? Sure it can and the one is now 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 Teraflex project, here we also used Wordpress and Magento platforms for the development.

Delete test orders in Magento

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Magento @ 23rd OCT 2008

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?

Magento MySQL database diagram

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Magento @ 20th OCT 2008

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 Entity-Attribute-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?

Magento product view page analysis (available in PDF)

Posted by Branko Ajzele under Magento @ 16th OCT 2008

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.

Improve your development time

Posted by Branko Ajzele under Tools @ 14th OCT 2008

If you are developer working on a open source technologies then most likely you are using open source or some freeware tools. Since I’m a PHP developer this post will show examples in context of PHP. Developing for PHP can be quite a fun, or sometimes quite painful.

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.