Posts by Tomislav Bilic

Is Hyvä Your Next Magento Frontend Solution?

Inchoo meets Hyvä

Magento, a global name in the eCommerce platform arena, has been the backbone for countless online stores since the year of Inchoo’s inception – 2008. Yet, despite its robust backend capabilities, Magento’s frontend has historically been its Achilles’ heel. In this article, we’ll delve into why Hyvä theme has emerged as the premier choice for many Magento stores.

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Inchoo just turned 10!

Tenchoo

Ten years ago, Croatian Commercial Court published a statement that Inchoo is registered as a legal entity. Oh boy, it was an adventure since. That 2008 was very exciting for the eCommerce ecosystem. Recession was in the news all over the world. Many businesses started to optimise their costs and many merchants opened their online sales channels. On top of that, many new eCommerce businesses started to appear.

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Inchoo won The Golden Marten Award

Inchoo won The Golden Marten Award

After 9 years in business, Inchoo won The Golden Marten Award (Zlatna kuna), traditionally given to the most successful local companies by the Croatian Chamber of Economy. We received it as the best small company in Osijek-Baranja County. Why did we win it for 2016? There were 21 distinct areas that were rated and Inchoo had very high scores in employment increase, average salary, non-material assets, financial stability and self-funding.

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We moved to a new office. Finally!

Inchoo Office Library

If you are following us on social media channels, you already noticed that we moved to a new office. Every one we had before was a place we enjoyed working in. This time around it was different. We have a place that inspires us.

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The Budapest Brothers

The Budapest Brothers

Doing business is fulfilling in many ways. We know how important it is to find a niche, focus on quality, improve marketing & sales, find talent, have clean and stable finances, be profitable, build a brand, have mission & vision and so on… But, the most beautiful thing about doing business is making friends.

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Bye bye 2015. You were amazing!

Bye bye 2015. You were amazing!

Hi. I hope you had a wonderful New Year celebration. Putting festivities aside, beginning of January is the time we all use to analyse the past and plan the future. Looking back on eight years Inchoo is in business, I can happily say that 2015 was an amazing year for us. This might be an understatement. It was the best year ever. Here are the reasons why.

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CodeCAMP – Giving back to the community

CodeCAMP by Osijek Software City

Important part of company’s growth is giving back to the local community. Such process is even more powerful if the employees are involved. It strongly sets corporate culture, makes a company stronger and employees happier. Most importantly, it makes a local community better.

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Introducing new design – a responsive story

Introducing new design – a responsive story

Ladies and gentlemen, our dear visitors, fans and followers. With great joy, I would like to introduce you to our new website redesign – Inchoo v4. I hope that this refreshment will keep the spirit of previous sites and provide better user experience for all device types. Yes, this means that the site is now responsive. The purpose will remain intact – to benefit Magento community by sharing knowledge and presenting our services.

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Inchoo invites you to OMGcommerce 2014.

Inchoo invites you to OMGcommerce 2014.

Dear visitors, Inchoo would like to invite you to Southeastern Europe’s Biggest Ecommerce Conference – OMGcommerce. Book the date April 25th, 2014 – Kras AUDITORIUM, Zagreb, Croatia and join over 300 internet and retail professionals from Balkan region. Speakers include Marc Wiseler – Enterprise Sales Manager at Magento, Joann Johnstone – Operations Director at Zee&Co (our client), Dejan Oreskovic – Business Development Manager at Mondo.hr (our client), Hrvoje Jurisic – Lead Frontend developer at Inchoo and many others.

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Inchoo Visual Identity Redesign

Inchoo Visual Idenity v3

I can’t believe one year already passed since the time we contacted MIT design studio to help us in visual identity redesign process. I believe some of you noticed a new logo and some changes on our Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages. In this post, I will show you some of the offline materials. However, the story is not complete. We are in the process of redesigning a biggest component – our website.

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One of the first Magento Certified Front End Developers in the World

One of the first Magento Certified Front End Developers in the World

We received a news few days ago that Vanja Devcic and Hrvoje Jurisic achieved the passing score and therefore have achieved the status of Magento Certified Front End Developers. It was a great news for us since they are one of the first in the world.

We were invited late January to participate in a certification beta testing session for Magento Front End Developers. We couldn’t just take the voucher to some testing centre as we normally do. Instead, we needed to go to a place called Fast Lane Institute for Knowledge Transfer GmbH – Munich.

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Osijek Software City

Osijek Software City

Hi folks. I was chatting yesterday with a guy from Slovenia. After a few introduction lines, he was surprised to find out that we are from Croatia – his neighbour country. According to his words, he was reading the website for many months, but never bothered to look where are we from. We are Inchoo, four-and-a-half years old company from Osijek, town with population of 100.000 at North-East of the country. Close to Hungary and Serbia. Besides very eventful history, we are nowadays getting recognised by strong software development community. Due to this reason, in 2012, several software companies started the initiative called Osijek Software City.

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Packing bags for Imagine

Packing bags for Imagine

There are only few hours left to pack the bags, drive to Budapest, than over Amsterdam and Portland arrive to the biggest Magento event of the year – Imagine conference in Las Vegas, USA. The conference was sold out months ago, but fortunately the arrival was planned before.

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We renewed our Magento Silver Partnership Status

We renewed our Magento Silver Partnership Status

Recent acquisition of Magento rattles the cage of Magento community these days. The news brought some level of unsettlement to the souls of Magento developers. Some of them switched the panic mode on and even wondered whether it is time to leave the ship.

However, when the dust settled, people realize that not so much wil change. Most important fact is that X.Commerce will not be a platform. It is just a concept that wraps different solutions and technologies together. Therefore, Magento will stay is quite similar shape and goals as it is. In the light of these events, we renewed our partnership program because we strongly believe Magento is and will be the primal eCommerce platform in years to come.

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1st Inchoo Learning Day

1st Inchoo Learning Day

Check our images on FlickrWe’re hoping to start a new tradition with the event we organized today. 1st Inchoo Learning Day took place in Zlatna Greda, Croatia where the group of geeks (Inchooers) gathered to discuss and learn about programming best practices. The idea is simple. We will take one Friday every two months to go somewhere in the nature and spend a day working on education and knowledge sharing.

We knew it will be a fun event, but we weren’t sure if it will be as useful as we hoped. Now, few days after, things are clear. It was a great thing to have a day like this where developers will move away from computers and share knowledge between each other.

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Top 3 annoying things in Basecamp

Top 3 annoying things in Basecamp

“It’s simple for us and it’s simple for clients” cried Željko Prša, our frontend developer over a year ago in our first Ask a developer episode. Our clients know that we use Basecamp as our collaboration tools because of its simplicity and the fact that clients get familiar with it in a short time. However, we really miss some of the simple features that would improve usability a lot.

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Mysteries of Magento Encryption Key

Mysteries of Magento Encryption Key

If you ever went through Magento installation process, you know that at some point you are asked for Magento Encryption key. Magento will automatically generate one for you if you do not enter anything in this field. For first installation, this is just fine. You will see a note that Magento uses this key to encrypt passwords, credit cards and more. Is this really the case?

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Is it time for the 1st Croatian eCommerce client?

Is it time for the 1st Croatian eCommerce client?

As some of you may know, our team is located in lovely small country called Croatia (it is in Europe). Our mission is to create a microbrand for  eCommerce development services. Since we were using Magento as a platform of choice, we ended up creating a microbrand for a Magento development services. On the long run, our goal is to be recognized in eCommerce community and not just Magento’s. There is a long way to go to achieve this, but here we are: working in the international world, with clients all over the globe. From US ones, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, France, United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong. Only one Croatian client hired us for iPhone development services. Is it time for first Croatian eCommerce client?

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Remove SID query from Magento URLs

Remove SID query from Magento URLs

Many people wonder why sometimes the SID part appears in their Magento URLs. This is when your URL has additional SID query usually at the end. Take a look at the image. The curiosity is that it does not appear always. What is the most common scenario it happens? You didn’t access the site with the same domain variant you entered as your “Base URL” in your System> Configuration> Web interface.

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We have a new design

We have a new design

Bye bye old site! Today we launched a new design where we wanted to make the text more readable, interesting and also we wanted to invite you, our dear visitors to contact us if you need some help with your projects.  We do hope you will like the new design as much as we do.  Inchoo has over 21.000 monthly visitors according to Google Analytics and a 15-30% monthly growth. We hope this trend will continue in the future and that you will keep coming back.

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Simple product with custom options in grouped product in Magento

Simple product with custom options in grouped product in Magento

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.

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What is the best shopping cart?

What is the best shopping cart?

If you try to ask this question on some forum or newsgroup, you will surely get many replies. Everyone will present you his favorite. My first developed online store was created with standard osCommerce platform. After three or four projects, I started to work with CRE Loaded and used it frequently for years.  Although it was also an osCommerce fork, it had many advantages. I switched to Magento™ early this year and this is my final choice.

Let’s look at the popularity of those platforms now.

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Kapitol Reef :: Magento store with 1 product

Kapitol Reef :: Magento store with 1 product

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.

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Magento MySQL database diagram

Magento MySQL database diagram

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?

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UPS API Quest

UPS API Quest

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.

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Manual creation of Google Sitemap in Magento

Manual creation of Google Sitemap in Magento

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.

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FogBugz – Project Management Tool

FogBugz – Project Management Tool

Working on a project as only developer having direct contact with the client gives you the freedom not to think too much of a communication tool you will use. Couple of meetings, phone calls and an email will be just fine. After 3-4 weeks, you deliver the project and the communication is over. If that is your common scenario, than skip evaluation of this tool.

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