Category / Magento

Handling intensive Magento tasks in the background, simulating AJAX via CRON

Handling intensive Magento tasks in the background, simulating AJAX via CRON

For those of a weak hart, please skip this article. Before I start presenting the idea, please note that this is just an idea. So what’s it about? In our everyday Magento development there are numerous examples/tasks where we need to import some data into Magento or programmatically create some entries like products, orders, customers, etc. When dealing with larger scale of things, importing/creating 50000 of products can turn out to be a real challenge. Usually we (the developers) strive to a simplest possible solution, which in this case ideally would be to make simple foreach loop where we would have our code handling product creation in each iteration of the loop. Technically this works, but with extreme PHP/environment configurations only. Read more

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How to set multiple stores/websites with one magento installation on different domains

How to set multiple stores/websites with one magento installation on different domains

This article will describe quickest way how to use and configure one Magento installation on different domains.
Point here is what do you want to have on that different domains, for example you want to have chosen categories/products on one domain and the other one will be on different language.
First you figure that and then go to configuration.
Read more

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Load XLS files into Magento modules using PHP-ExcelReader class

Load XLS files into Magento modules using PHP-ExcelReader class

Recently I had a small problem and it turned out that it wasn’t small as a initially thought. I had to read XLS (Microsoft Excel document) into PHP. After I spent almost 2 hours browsing through internet, I found myself most satisfied with open source project “PHP-ExcelReader class“. It has everything I needed (multiple sheets support and it could read data from both Excel 2000 and 2007). On the other hand, Magento doesn’t support XLS, and I decided to write a small method that you can implement in any Magento class. Read more

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Simple Magento Extension generator

Simple Magento Extension generator

Writing Magento modules on a everyday basis can become extremely boring job when it comes to the part where you define your module directories, config file, model, block, helper, etc. What I am trying to say is that there is significant amount of repetitive work being done each time you start new module development. To compensate for this a little bit, I created this little Magento module that helps you create other modules. Hope it does not sound to much confusing. Read more

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Magento and Google Services Integration – All-In-One Guide

Magento and Google Services Integration – All-In-One Guide

There are tutorials all around the web as well as at the Inchoo website that guide you through various Google services integration with Magento eCommerce platform. I wanted to unite all of these resources on one place and also bring something new to the table. Read more

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Programmatically create order in Magento

Programmatically create order in Magento

Surprisingly one of the trickiest parts of “under the hood” Magento is how to create order programmatically. At least for me, this was/is the most complex area of Magento development. Reason why it is so difficult is that the order creation process is all but not straightforward. You cannot simply instantiate order model, set some data and call upon the save() method. If you ask me, this is how it should be done. Read more

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Magento custom model with custom validation rules

Magento custom model with custom validation rules

Creating your own Magento module usually goes along with creating your own models within the module. Either you write one or multiple models per module, its a good idea to implement model validation method which you might/should call prior to model save. Good example of Magento’s model that use validation are Mage_Customer_Model_Customer and Mage_Customer_Model_Address_Abstract models. Quick look into the “public function validate()” methods of those two models reveal the simplicity of validation process. Read more

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Magento Project Stratus

Magento Project Stratus

Guido Jansen recently broke the news of the new landing page at Magento’s official website that promotes so far unannounced service under the name of “Project Stratus“. This appears to be Magento in the cloud. Read more

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Custom typography in Magento – @font-face

Custom typography in Magento – @font-face

If you want to add some juice to your e-commerce website, and be different from the others, you could add some custom fonts for you headings, product titles or prices.

Read more

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Listing products by attribute

Listing products by attribute

This is step by step tutorial for the beginners that will show you how to list products by attribute.
I will start with functions that Magento already has built-in: New products and Promotional products. Read more

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