Magento Design and Development » Branko Ajzele

Custom Magento Events: Customer First Order

Often you will stumble upon a case where Magento lacks certain events that you can easily observe. Various business cases can sometimes truly stretch the boundaries of even the best shopping carts like Magento. Luckily, creating or more properly said …

Geocoding Customer Addresses in Magento via Google Maps

Geocoding is the process of finding associated geographic coordinates (often expressed as latitude and longitude) from other geographic data, such as street addresses, or zip codes (postal codes)… so says Wikipedia. Geocoding an address is pretty simple if you are …

Reusing Magento’s calendar control

One of the cool things in Magento is that there is so many controls (widgets, blocks), etc. that you can reuse on the frontend or on the backend. One such control is the calendar control. Calendar control is mostly just …

Creating an EAV based model(s) in Magento

Magento database heavily utilizes an Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) data model. However, the cost of flexibility is often complexity. The process of manipulating EAV data in Magento is often more difficult than manipulating flat relational tables. All Magento Models inherit from the …

MagentoU “Fundamentals of Magento Development” impressions

Few days ago I was attending the MagentoU’s “Fundamentals of Magento Development” course in London. It’s a five day course covering Magento internals inside out (at least that’s the idea ). Price of the course at the moment is around …

CheckItOut, alternative checkout for Magento

If for some reason you are not a big fan of Magento’s default One Page Checkout concept / workflow, it might be worth checking out alternative. Usually these alternatives come in a form of so called “one step checkout” where …

Configuring Magento for development

New to the Magento or just used to doing things one way? Here are few tips for configuring Magento for development, in case you overlooked them. Please note, the more proper title of this article would be something like: Configuring …

Magento Trusted Extensions

About ten months ago I wrote an article titled Magento Extensions Quality Assurance Certification. If you read it, then you know it was a pure result of my imagination. In that article I spoke about (then) current state of various …

Magento certification, why bother?

Few days ago Magento announced their plans for Magento certification program. As they stated, initial round of certification will be a Beta exam, held on Innovate Developer Conference in San Francisco, October 12 and 13! Those who pass the exam …

Creating your own web shop – Part 1: Where to start

Creating your own web shop can be a tedious task, both technically and time consuming. Not to mention there are tens of quality PHP based web shop systems out there available for free. One of the best if you ask …

Magento’s “Quote/Order/Invoice” workflow

The purpose of this article is to shed some light onto the flow of things that happen behind the scene in the process of creating and later invoicing order in Magento. In order to properly code new functionality surrounding order …

HowTo – “Google +1″ extension for Magento

Embedding Google’s +1 button is pretty easy and straightforward. All it takes is to include 2 code snippets in your web page. One goes in the header of the page, and the other one goes to wherever where you want …

PHP to (Java) Android – Array vs HashMap

One of the coolest and most powerful things in PHP are arrays. Why? Simply put, you can place almost anything in them. Recently I was playing with the JSON API calling various API methods and passing parameters. For a moment …

Debugging Web Service API communication in Android

Proper and fast debugging is a key to any application development. Unlike my great experience with PHP where I usually debug whatever I need in a breeze, I found my self against the wall when working with Android and web …

PHP to Android – Simulate the $_SESSION behavior

Poking around Google Android is really fun. I really like the platform, although I’m not that big of a Java fan. Anyhow, as a web developer my mind set is sometimes wired to certain architectural views of web development vs. …

MagentoGO screenshot tour

MagentoGO has been released few days ago. To be more precise on 28th of February 2011. For those interested here are few screenshots from its Admin panel. All in all, I’m pretty impressed with what they have done with it. …

ZendFramework example on using Google URL Shortener service

Seems like URL shorteners have gain extreme popularity with web services like Twitter. Not to mention the fact that long URLs are somewhat hard to pass along. They are also harder to verbalize in a conversation, and above all in …

How you could serve static content files from your Magento extension folder

As a part of my personal ongoing “unobtrusive Magento extensions” campaign. I will show you another “hack”/approach you can apply in order to squeeze your static files under the main extension folder. When I say static, I am mainly referring …

How you could build your Magento extensions without view files

The main idea behind this article is something I previously wrote, making your extensions more distributable, less error prone, less depended, less intrusive. Such extensions are then more “safer” to be fetched and installed via Magento Connect. When I say …

Logging user/customer actions in Magento

Recently I wrote a Magento extension called ActionLogger, inspired (thematically) by the “Logging of Administrator Actions” feature available in Magento Enterprise. ActionLogger is pretty simple extension, working on pretty simple but powerful concept of Magento controllers predispatch action. All you …