Magento

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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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().

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Manual creation of Google Sitemap in Magento

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Magento @ 9th SEP 2008

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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Happy 1st birthday Magento

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Magento @ 31st AUG 2008

Magento celebrates his 1st birthday today and we wish to congratulate them for the first successful year. In this year Magento evolved to fully usable online store application and reached version 1.1. Over 425,000 downloads makes it the fastest growing ecommerce platform on the market. Community presented over 165 extensions via Magento Connect, but the real number of add ons is much greater. Inchoo and Surgeworks will keep you posted for about further development.

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Related products, Up-sells, Cross-sells in Magento

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Magento @ 28th AUG 2008

There are three types of product relations in Magento: Up-sells, Related Products, and Cross-sell Products.  When viewing a product, Upsells for this product are items that your customers would ideally buy instead of the product they’re viewing.  They might be better quality, produce a higher profit margin, be more popular, etc. These appear on the product info page. Related products appear in the product info page as well, in the right column. Related products are meant to be purchased in addition to the item the customer is viewing. Finally, Cross-sell items appear in the shopping cart.  When a customer navigates to the shopping cart (this can happen automatically after adding a product, or not), the cross-sells block displays a selection of items marked as cross-sells to the items already in the cart.  They’re a bit like impulse buys - like magazines and candy at the cash registers in grocery stores.

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Our first Magento Store :: TeraFlex Suspensions

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Magento, Wordpress @ 22nd AUG 2008

After many weeks of work, our 1st Magento project hit the Net: TeraFlex Suspensions. As the purpose of the site in not primary selling, but also branding and community development, we decided to use Wordpress and Magento combination to accomplish clients goals.

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