Advanced search in Magento and how to use it in your own way

Posted by Branko Ajzele under Magento @ 8th NOV 2008

It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been working on Magento quite actively last two months. I noticed this negative trend in my blogging; more I know about Magento, the less I write about it. Some things just look so easy now, and they start to feel like something I should not write about. Anyhow…. time to share some wisdom with community

Custom price filter in Magento

Posted by Branko Ajzele under Magento @ 3rd NOV 2008

Quite a few people have asked me for a price filter functionality that comes with Magento. Mostly, the questions are same: How does one put the price filter anywhere on the page? How does one set it’s on price ranges in that filter? What defines default price ranges. Is it possible to set price filter for all my products instead of just single category? Lot of questions. The answer might be simpler then you might think.

There are two ways to approach this problem. Head trough wall or stop and think approach.

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.

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.

Create a Color Switcher in Magento

Posted by Branko Ajzele under Magento @ 30th SEP 2008

Magento comes packed with a lot of options. But no matter how many options you put into some product you can never cover all of them. One of such options (for now) is a color switcher in Magento. To be more precise, an image switcher based on color selection.

Recently I’ve made a screencast on my site on this subject, with somewhat different title. The idea is to have a dropdown box from which you choose a color and based on the color selection product image changes. All of this is to be based on some simple javascript (in my case, jQuery).

Figuring out Magento object context

Posted by Branko Ajzele under Magento, Tools @ 10th SEP 2008

One of the problems working under the hood of the Magento CMS is determining the context of $this. If you are about to do any advanced stuff with your template, besides layout changes, you need to get familiar with Magento’s objects (classes).

Let’s have a look at the /app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/product/view.phtml file. If you open this file and execute var_dump($this) your browser will return empty page after a short period of delay. By page I mean on the product view page; the one you see when you click on Magetno product. Experienced users will open PHP error log and notice the error message caused by var_dump().