Ecommerce developers with Magento

Magento has quite interesting email sending capabilities. However, those are more in terms of email templates then selecting a non-built in email server. Sometimes, your web hosting might have separate mail server and even the simple php send mail does not work. In such cases you are forced to use an external mail server that supports SMTP. Good example of this is a Gmail.

Magento has pretty neat image helper you can use to output your product photos. Today one of my coworkers got frustrated with the white frame he kept getting around the resized image he tried to output in sidebar block. As s possible solution he tried resolving the issue with CSS. However, there is a better, more nicer solution to ditch the whit frame around resized images in Magento.

Suppose you are working on a extension that needs to either change some stuff or implement new stuff in the one of the Magento admin areas. For example, imagine a “Images” tab on the product edit section. If you were in a position where you need to do certain modifications on “Images” tab then you would most likely need to modify the app/design/adminhtml/default/default/template/catalog/product/helper/gallery.phtml file to do so. One of Inchoo coworkers and a good friend of mine, Ivan Weiler, made a Magento Admin theme module that enables you to achieve similar functionality for admin template files as you have for frontend template files.

Magento comes packed with several product types: simple, grouped, configurable, virtual, bundle, downloadable. Sometimes clients request can reach beyond any of these built in product types functionality. In such cases, usual way of handling things is throwing some new attributes and hooking into some events from which you can handle and “re-route” certain logic.

Given the sheer size of Magento system, its quite easy to loose valuable time when trying to achieve even the basic things like “Creating simplest ORM model class”. Substantial amount of serious programming in Magento requires you to write some values to database.

Recently one of our clients noticed some buggy behavior around its tier pricing. Clients demands were such that he needed an extra bit more functionality on top of the existing tier pricing feature, which is understandable. To comply to the request we went trough the discussion of either building such features ourself or reusing one of the existing extensions free/commercial.

Yesterday I published a little HowTo article providing a start-up widget for Magetno. As a follow up to that article, here is a practical widget you can use on your Magento 1.4 powered store.

Hello inchoo readers. As we are nearing the Christmas time, I felt I could write down some free code and share with you. Yesterday I got all excited seeing Magento 1.4 beta1 available for download. As you can guess, it did not took me long to download and install it. One of the most interesting features, for me, are the widgets.

Sometimes, clients requirements exceed the defaults built into the Magento. Recently we came across a task that among other things required manipulation of bundle products in Magento. In order to help my coworker Tomas I wrote this little code snippet that programatically adds bundle product to cart.

For those of you who love Google Custom Search and would like to use it with the Magento, here is a little how to. Entire embed process is really easy. It all comes down to copy paste-ing few lines of code from Google to Magento. My idea is to create the static block in Magento CMS section and then use the custom CMS page from which I will call this statick block among other HTML content I might wish to throw into the CMS page.