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Magento deployment with Deployer

Magento deployment with Deployer

Remember those days when you could easily deploy something to production without executing each time a number of commands and clearing cache a few times meanwhile? Yeah, me neither.

Every modern framework or platform has their own individual perks that shape our development and deploying process. Magento is no different here and its deployment process can be a challenge for newcomers.

In this post, we will introduce Deployer, automated deployment tool for PHP.

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eCommerce UX – measuring the business value of UX investments

ux-business-values-inchoo

As a website owner, you’ve probably invested a lot of time and money in development, UI design, marketing etc. But what was the last time you asked yourself questions like: “How easy is for users to find what they are looking for? What frustrates them? How do they feel and will they come back?”

Online shopping went through a dramatic transformation in the last few years. The responsive design is adopted and it is needless to say mobile is important in 2018, so what’s the next big thing?

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Creating Sylius Fixtures

Sylius

What are fixtures in Sylius?

Fixtures are plain PHP objects that are designed to change current system state by either persisting some entities to the database, uploading files or doing anything else that you might require.

In this post we will be going through the process of creating a bundle and in it our custom fixture , assigning it to our suite.

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Are you ready for new Google Ads experience?

New AdWords Features

When new Adwords interface first launched, everyone had an opinion on it. Some people liked it because it was cleaner and had some amazing new features, other just hated it because it was still in beta and had some pretty annoying bugs, but all of us just tried to learn to navigate through it before it’s too late. We knew that the day will come when Google will replace the old interface with this new AdWords experience (and also rebrand its service into Google Ads).

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Meet Magento Germany 2018 impressions (or how do Hungarian dogs bark)

Meet Magento Germany 2018 impressions (or how do hungarian dogs bark)

From the very start, this journey was meant to be great and sure it was! We have heard only the best about both Leipzig and previous Meet Magento conferences, and Antun, Aron, Dunja and I made a great trip team. I was given the honor of writing a recap of it so as a Meet Magento first-time-participant I will do my best. 🙂 Just a short overview to make it all clear before we start.

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Unit testing in Magento 2

Unit testing in Magento 2

Magento 2 comes pre-installed with PHPUnit, an automated testing framework for PHP. It is included as one of the dependencies in Magento 2. Covering the basics of PHPUnit is out of the scope of this tutorial, after a short introduction we are going to focus on the practical example of using PHPUnit with Magento 2. For those who are interested in PHPUnit basics, I would recommend reading documentation or tutorials on the web since it is a very well documented topic.

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GDPR compliant Magento 2 database dump

GDPR compliant Magento 2 database dump

On May 25th, a data privacy law known as GDPR came into effect. It impacts the way companies collect and handle user data. In this article we will show you how to handle personal user data when creating database dumps in order to avoid potential GDPR penalties.

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Meet Magento Italy recap: fantastic time, amazing conference, awesome people!

Meet Magento Italy Inchoo recap

Five of our Inchooers went to support, network and learn something at Meet Magento Italy. Inchooers Hrvoje, Ivan, Zelimir, Nenad, and Tomislav packed their bags and visited the dreamy city of Venice.

Nenad even had a special mission – to get on the #MM18IT’s stage and talk about PWA. He was explaining PWA as a concept in the context of Magento.

In this interview with the guys, you can read about the trip, the takeaways from Nenad’s lecture and about Inchoo’s plans with PWA. For this last matter, if it’s TLDR; we’re dedicating almost the entire development track of Meet Magento Croatia to PWA! 🙂

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Symfony templating with Twig

Symfony templating with Twig

Symfony 4, (further in the text – Symfony) for templating provides twig bundle, which is a very useful templating engine. It is built by SensioLabs – the company behind Symfony. Besides Symfony, there are more platforms supporting Twig such as Drupal8, eZPublish, phpBB, Piwik, OroCRM, etc. In this article we will cover the basics and show how to extend them. Twig is by default not installed with Symfony, you need to include symfony/twig-bundle with the composer (composer require symfony/twig-bundle).

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This isn’t your typical Magento Imagine recap

Magento Imagine 2018

As many folks that have attended Imagine conference will write a blog post about their experience, I was wondering how my blog post could differ. I don’t want to just share what was happening there, as this whole adventure is hard to put into the words and Magento has already covered it pretty well.

But let’s see what I will be able to deliver.

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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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Local development with Valet+

Valet Plus

Development has been rapidly growing. In fact, at this stage, it has grown so much that it puts a lot of pressure on developers to become super-humans. However, the developers should do what they’re best at, and that is writing code without having to struggle with a local setup. Luckily, there are tools that help developers focus more on code and less on the environment.

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Inchoo is a Sylius Solution Partner! To celebrate, here’s an interview with Sylius’ Founder, Pawel Jedrzejewski

Inchoo and Sylius partnership

For a long time, our only platform of choice was Magento. It was simply the best match for SOHO, SMB and Mid Sized businesses, especially in the Magento 1 era. Ecosystem recognised this and embraced the platform fully, which empowered high growth. It gave our clients a great starting point, security and lots of options. But, a new generation of eCommerce platforms has matured, and we at Inchoo are excited with the possibilities they open.

Magento 2 positioned itself higher on a SMB scale and this created some new gaps/needs in the market. Now, we’re working with two platforms: Magento and Sylius and we feel that these are not direct competitors. Each one has a specific niche to fill. We will always consult our clients towards the selection of platform that is more tailored to their needs. It makes the whole creative process more efficient and the end results are better.

Sylius eCommerce Framework is the newest member of our partner family and platforms that we build stores with, and we couldn’t be more thrilled with that! Its founder, Paweł Jędrzejewski, held a three-day workshop at Inchoo for our specially chosen development team.

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Navigation – structure, usability and trends

Navigation – structure, usability and trends

Whether it’s a website, an app navigation, your mobile phone menu or the menu in your car – navigation is one of the fundamental features of every digital product. By providing clear and well-structured navigation, you relieve your users of confusion. This makes it easy for them to find what they’re looking for. If users can’t find their way around your product it will frustrate them.

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On the road again – heading off to Imagine!

Antonija goes to Imagine - Inchoo

Every year, Imagine is aiming for the new heights. I mean, 150+ speakers with top names from the industry, 3000 attendees and Phillip Jackson as Master of Ceremonies? What could beat that?!

Twitter feed is filled with #MagentoImagine and #RoadToImagine posts, and they are a delight to watch. The community is showing its strength once again. We can’t say this enough, but there is no community like Magento community! Am I right or am I right?

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Office manager’s role at a software development company

Inchoo office manager's role

When thinking about the ideal job, it is the one that allows you to use your talent the best way possible, where your virtues can come forward, and peculiarities aren’t considered weaknesses. You’ll know it’s worthwhile if you have the will to get up from your warm and cosy bed on a cold, dark Monday morning.

The office manager position at Inchoo gave me the opportunity to put some of my most prominent characteristics to use and take joy in doing so. Even though this position is not new in business world, many people don’t know what its real purpose is, what are the daily responsibilities, and what the position’s requirements and expectations are.

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Symphony of PHP – Symfony 4

Symphony PHP Inchoo

You have probably heard of PHP framework called Symfony, today I will share my and Inchoo’s experience with this great framework. You can basically do anything in Symfony, but the most important question you should ask yourself is: Should I use Symfony for my application? In order to help you answer the question, I will try to explain basic concepts, give my thoughts and share some experiences in eCommerce development.

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Ready for 2nd Meet Magento Croatia with agenda focused on PWA? Book the dates!

Meet Magento Croatia MM18HR

Reserve 28th and 29th of September 2018 for the second Meet Magento Croatia!

Last year we hosted a crowd of more than 200 participants from 18 countries at first ever Meet Magento in Croatia! If you were there, you had the opportunity to learn from and mingle with developers, merchants, and eCommerce specialists. And attend an awesome party, because at Inchoo – we know how to have fun!

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Review: Reacticon – Power to the front-end developers!

PWA Reacticon

Ever since Magento announced their PWA (Progressive Web App) Studio and PWA solutions like Deity started gaining traction, people were more than eager to learn more about how PWA would affect Magento platform and the world of eCommerce in general. Reacticon sought to provide some more in depth information about technologies that will become integral part of our workflow in the near future.

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Sticky Sidebar in Magento

Sticky sidebar

An idea for writing this blog post inspired me for implementing this feature on two Magento 1 projects, on first project it was one of many changes that were part of A/B testing, on the second one it was part of creating a new visual identity for clients store.

So, what basically is sticky sidebar and why should it be used to improve your conversion rate? Well, just like sticky header, the purpose of sticky sidebar is to have the sidebar element displayed in the viewport at all times (or an at least, when some conditions are met). This is ideal place to move the product options (configurable dropdowns, image swatches etc), add to cart button or any other element that is important for your product. With this being said, your customer is free to browse all of the content on your product and once the decision has been made to purchase the product, the add to cart button is just waiting to be clicked on!

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Klevu with Magento 2 Template

Klevu with Magento 2 Template © http://jake-clark.tumblr.com/

We have talked about Klevu in one of our previous articles – what it is, how to install and use it, and most important, how it can improve your store. In this article we are going to focus on Search Results Page. Make sure you have at least Klevu Premium pricing plan to have the ability to chose template at all. 🙂

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How to display CMS block in Magento 2 Checkout

How to display CMS block in Magento 2 Checkout

Working with CMS blocks was one of the reasons Magento was and is so popular. Using CMS blocks, site administrator can easily manipulate content of the store. CMS blocks can be used to display promotional banners, sale blocks, return policies, important information message on some sections of the store etc. CMS blocks can carry plain text or chunks of HTML/JS/CSS code which means they can be used for even more complex content delivery like sliders, product carousels etc.

I personally like to use CMS blocks whenever I can so that content of the store becomes more “modular” and easily manageable.

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The process of improving online store usability and design your customers will enjoy

The process of improving online store usability and design your customers will enjoy

The only point of contact your customer has with your online store, is the designed interface. Ever wondered exactly what they think of it? Long gone are the days when the design was purely a visual discipline. It shifted into a responsibility, where designers are also to be valued for their understanding of the product being built. Design doesn’t just paint the building, it builds the stairs to an overall better usability and collaboration of everyone included. It is necessary to update our processes with thorough understanding of end users, colleagues and stakeholders to make responsible and risk-reduced design decisions. Change through user testing is what keeps the design process relevant and competitive.

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Reorder input fields on Shipping and Billing step in Magento 2

Reorder input fields on Shipping and Billing step in Magento 2

With time we are becoming more and more familiar with Magento 2 Checkout. And we are trying to build our knowledge furthermore. Hopefully, this article will help you in that process. With this article, we’ll learn how to change inputs fields ordering on the Checkout page.

If you ever tested Magento 2 you are familiar with default Magento 2 Checkout and the default fields sort ordering. If you wish to want to recall it, check this screenshot:

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Create a multi-language store in Magento 2 – Part 2

Create a multi-language store in Magento 2 Part 2

In the first post from this series, we’ve focused more on theory and technical background behind multi-language Magento2 store. Now, we’ll create Magento2 store with additional French language. First thing is to go to the administration and create a new store view. Before we proceed, please check documentation where is explained a difference between store view, store and website, old but still relevant, http://docs.magento.com/m1/ce/user_guide/store-operations/stores-multiple.html.

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How to improve usability for Magento 2 add to cart process

How to improve usability for Magento 2 add to cart process

Magento 2 introduced a new and improved way for adding products to the cart. The system now offers complete asynchronous (ajax) process, although the process itself is not activated in default application state. It requires some manual adjustments in the script call inside the templates. Someone would think, ok, we will simply modify the template script calls and that’s it! We successfully improved the process. Unfortunately, not so fast! There is still more room left for improvement. If you’re interested, let’s find out what’s left on the table.

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Allow backorders on a website scope

Allow backorders on a website scope

We’re all aware of the fact that Magento handles inventory of products in a (fairly) straightforward fashion. There is only one “warehouse”, one inventory, one “number” in the database that is responsible for a final say – how much of it is in stock. A lot of other functionality is dependent on the fact that stock is global. If we check “Advanced inventory” configuration from the administration of a product, we notice that all of the options are global: Out of stock threshold, Minimum and maximum qty allowed in Shopping Cart, backorders, notifications etc.

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