Structure of mysql table eav_attribute, Magento version 1.3:

In new version of Magento, we have new table as: catalog_eav_attribute, customer_eav_attribute and so on…..

One important thing: the model Mage_Eav_Model_Entity_Setup has changes in new version of Magento. I have a problems with update attributes.

So, how do we “switch” our Magento to use Gmail? Here is a small extension I wrote for my self. Figured why not give it away.

Download Ajzele_MailTransport extension.

And here is a little screenshot that shows the available config options.

As always, use at your own risk

Here is a practical example of a code sample from default media.phtml file:

    < ?php foreach ($this->getGalleryImages() as $_image): ?>
        <li>
            <a href="#" onclick="popWin('<?php echo $this->getGalleryUrl($_image) ?>', 'gallery', 'width=300,height=300,left=0,top=0,location=no,status=yes,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes'); return false;" title="< ?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_image->getLabel()) ?>"><img src="<?php echo $this-/>helper('catalog/image')->init($this->getProduct(), 'thumbnail', $_image->getFile())->resize(56); ?>" width="56" height="56" alt="< ?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_image->getLabel()) ?>" /></a>
        </li>
    < ?php endforeach; ?>

Turning it into this will yield a “frame-free” image:

< ?php foreach ($this->getGalleryImages() as $_image): ?>
	<li>
		<a href="#" onclick="popWin('<?php echo $this->getGalleryUrl($_image) ?>', 'gallery', 'width=300,height=300,left=0,top=0,location=no,status=yes,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes'); return false;" title="< ?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_image->getLabel()) ?>"><img src="<?php echo $this-/>helper('catalog/image')->init($this->getProduct(), 'thumbnail', $_image->getFile())->keepFrame(false)->resize(56); ?>" alt="< ?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_image->getLabel()) ?>" /></a>
	</li>
< ?php endforeach; ?>

As you can see, all it took was to add the keepFrame(false) method call prior to calling the resize() method.

Here are the results of before/after scenario.

Hope it helps around minor styling issues

Cheers.

Download Inchoo_Facebook-0.9.1.zip, extract files to appropriate place following directory structure, reload cache and navigate to http://www.yourstore.com/facebook/. You’ll be presented with more detailed help page.

For Facebook Connect to work you need to Setup Application on Facebook and obtain its API Key and Application Secret.

Use your store name as application name and read and accept terms of service. On second screen switch to Connect tab and set Connect URL to the store domain where you plan to implement Facebook Connect. Switch to Advanced tab, set the domain that your emails will be coming from in Email Domain field and save settings.
Other Connect settings are optional, but you might want to add store logo for example.

Once you obtain two keys navigate to Magento Administration, copy/paste them to appropriate fields under Configuration-Customer-Facebook Connect and you’re good to go.

Current extension is compatible with latest Magento CE 1.3.2.x and 1.4.x versions, it’s using brand new Facebook features like email sharing and open source APIs and we hope it will grow along with them.

We’re working on few more possible features and minor polishing, so you can expect version 1.0.0 on Magento Connect soon, but we wanted to share this pre-release with our faithful readers . As usual, every feedback is more than welcome.

Enjoy!

Updates
v.0.9.1 – Added compatibility with older Magento CE 1.3.2.x versions.
v.0.9.0 – First public release. Compatible with Magento CE 1.4.x.

While Google’s algorithm still gives me more relevant results for most of the searches, there are searches where Bing’s results are much more relevant and spam free.

I think Google’s biggest disadvantage in this war for the search industry share will be it’s constant improvements. When we compare the results Google is giving us today to the results we got several years ago, we can see Google is wasting a lot of our time.

1. Images in search results

I just hate it when Google serves me images in normal search. If i wanted to look at the images I’d use the image search. There is simply no need for you to show me images. In most cases, things I search for can’t even be described with an image. Why are you forcing these images on me? Did I ask for them?

2. Video in search

This one is pretty similar to the image problem. Why are you giving me video if I didn’t ask for one? I can’t even imagine a situation in which I’d use your search to find a video I wanna watch. I’d probably search YouTube or maybe in some extreme situations use your video search. I don’t want videos in my normal search results so stop wasting my time please.

3. Personalized search

No, I don’t want my search results to be personalized. Why would I want that? I’m using a search engine to find stuff I don’t know about, why would I want the websites I visit all the time and know about them already show up on top of my search results? If I want a bookmarking service I’ll use one. I don’t want my search engine to be the bookmarking service. Chris Crum of the WebProNews wrote about the similar issue with personalized search.

4. Geo-location based redirection

Sometimes I have a need to check something on Google.com but due to my geographic location I get redirected back to Google.hr. Why would you do that? That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever! If I wanted Google.hr I’d go to Google.hr

At Bing, I simply tell it which country preference I want in my searches and it stays that way. It doesn’t redirect me back to my country if I don’t ask for it. That’s the way it should be, it’s the only logical way.

5. Google accounts

I once spent half a day trying to integrate my AdWords and Analytics goals on two different accounts. I’ve read the entire help section to find the crucial information buried somewhere deep inside the sea of text. Why is this so complex? Why doesn’t your account simply work on your products? Why is there a difference between “Google account” and “gmail account” while both are “email”? Google, why are you wasting my time?

Developers probably noticed that errors also are no longer displayed like before, as mentioned on Magento blog:
Since version 1.4.0.0 for security reasons the trace in the Magento error report page is disabled by default. The “Error log number” does not give any information about the error. To enable the trace copy the errors/local.xml.sample to errors/local.xml and follow the instructions described in that file.

By default, error logs are placed in /var/report, named by mentioned log number. local.xml file is well commented, so open it and check possible configuration options. I really like emailing of error reports to specified email address.

If you want to change default maintenance look, you can change myskin value in /errors/local.xml file and create new /errors/myskin folder based on /errors/default. It functions the similar way as themes, if the phtml file isn’t found in your skin, the default will be used.

Till next time

The possibility of statistical mistake in optimization tests is a pretty big issue. I’ve seen case studies all over the internet with ridiculous conclusions and ridiculously big improvements all because the performer of the test made a mistake (sometimes I believe they even do it intentionally to show better results to their clients).

There are several things that can go wrong with these tests and here are the most common mistakes:

Low test sample

During the latest presidential elections here in Croatia, some smart people calculated that possibility of statistical mistake with a test sample of 10 000 randomly selected people is ~3%.

They weren’t wrong in all these years that these tests were performed; these tests were always accurate with exactly ~3% deviation.

Please note that this is a test sample of 10 000 people that performed the desired action. If we transfer this knowledge to the world of e-commerce, it would mean that our sample should be 10 000 transactions, not 10 000 visitors.

There isn’t a lot of stores in the world that can get 10 000 transactions in a reasonable time period, so I’m led to believe that most of the conversion rate optimization split tests performed out there are not really accurate.

This calculation (10 000 transactions = ~3% statistical mistake) is true for the election body of 4 402 045 people. In order to get the right calculation for your specific case, you need to calculate the amount of people out there that fit the criteria of your targeted audience. This means that some B2C e-commerce store with wide market of lets say 45 000 000 potential customers would need 100 000 transactions to achieve ~3% possibility of statistical mistake.

Low time period

Let’s say you have a store and you could actually get a relevant test sample of 10 000 transactions within days. You need to extend this test to a longer time period then a few days.

What could happen is, you tested variations during the working days and only a certain population of people with certain behavior comes to your site Monday to Friday. Your test didn’t really capture the behavior of people visiting your store during the weekends and this population might have a completely different behavior compared to your test sample.

Unrepresentative test sample

Choose your methods wisely. I’ve actually explained this in the article before. You could increase the conversion rate of a store by actually decreasing the revenue. It’s highly recommended to read this article to understand how increasing the conversion rate (the percentage) is not the actual goal of conversion rate optimization (I know, it sounds crazy, but just read it).

Step 1.
This is example of event hocking, put it in config.xml

<adminhtml>
        <events>
            <core_block_abstract_prepare_layout_before>
    			<observers>
                    <reward>
                        <class>grid/observer</class>
                        <method>applyLimitToGrid</method>
                    </reward>
                </observers>
    		</core_block_abstract_prepare_layout_before>

        </events>
    </adminhtml>

Step 2.
Create model class observer.php

class Inchoo_Grid_Model_Observer
{

    public function applyLimitToGrid(Varien_Event_Observer $observer)
    {
    	$block = $observer->getEvent()->getBlock();
    	if(($block instanceof Mage_Adminhtml_Block_Widget_Grid) && !($block  instanceof Mage_Adminhtml_Block_Dashboard_Grid))
    	$block->setDefaultLimit(200);

    }

}

It would be good that you make your own module and all put in it. I hope that you know how to make magento module.

However, keep in mind that I only tested this to work for my own configuration.

Basicly, what this snippet does is redirect to website’s default store base url.

<!-- BEGIN website switcher -->
<select id="website-changer" onChange="document.location=this.options[selectedIndex].value">
< ?php
$websites = Mage::getModel('core/website')->getCollection();
foreach($websites as $website)
{
    $default_store = $website->getDefaultStore();
    $url_obj = new Mage_Core_Model_Url();
    $default_store_path = $url_obj->getBaseUrl(array('_store'=> $default_store->getCode()));
?>
    <option <?php if(strstr($this->helper('core/url')->getCurrentUrl(), $default_store_path)):?>selected="selected"< ?php endif; ?> value="< ?php echo $default_store_path ?>">< ?php echo $website->getName()?></option>
< ?php
}
?>
</select>
<!-- END website switcher -->

This code comes with apsolutely no warranty, however I wish somebody will find it usable.
If you have any questions, you can ask here.

EDIT: As always WP has some code formating issues, I hope that’s not a problem

We still don’t have exact theory on what happened, but reading through comments it appears we have a fine idea on what might have caused this “coincidental” decrees in search volume for these major brands.

Joey Primiani has offered an explanation: “It is the inclusion of the providing the direct link inside Google Suggest.”

Following up to that comment, Dain Binder of the dainsmoviereviews.com adds:

Joey, I just did some tests on this and I think you are correct. When searching for “facebook.com” and going to the results it registers a search. When searching “facebook.com” and clicking on the suggestion direct link it does not.

I would say Google Trends is more accurate now; eliminating people that use it as a “browser”.

(Verified using Chrome with SideWiki with full search and browsing history saved by Google.)

Google’s engineer Matt Cutts joined the thread with:

I don’t have any first-hand knowledge and haven’t asked anyone else at Google about this, but I’d lean toward this sort of explanation.

Basically what this means is, Google is including the direct links for domain quarries to “fix” the problem of typical users who actually wanna “feel lucky” instead of search for all websites that contain the URL they entered in the search box.

This time, we’re featuring our backend developers Tomas Novoselic and Vedran Subotic.

Credits for the idea goes to Tomislav Bilic.

Product alerts

This one is my favorite since “Get notified when this product is back in stock” has been on my mind for quite some time as well as with many of the store owners and shoppers obviously and inevitably Varien decided to include it in this release.

In addition to the stock alert there is “price change” alert also and both of these alerts require registration which is great for getting more customers join the party

Cache Management and Index management

Cache management and Index management are now separated in two pages under “System” page.

- Cache management page now has some new additional functions to work with like “Flush Catalog Images Cache” that will clear the cache of pregenerated product images files and “Flush Javascript/CSS Cache” that will clear the cash when javascript and CSS are combined in one file each.

- Index management itself has been improved in terms of handling and speed. Separating it from cache management definitely gets things more easy for store owners when performing store maintenance.

Improved Javascript merging and new CSS merging

Although these features are in beta they are very stable and add tremendously to the store’s load speed which directly increases user experience especially when combined with cache enabled.

You can get it via file: magento-firephp-0.3.zip or even better, use Magento FirePHP Extension on Magento Connect.

Since FirePHP is implemented in Zend Framework it’s really easy to use it with Magento, my friend Branko wrote about it before.

Download FirePHP from its homepage www.firephp.org. You must have Firebug installed and the “Net” panel enabled to use it, and Firefox of course.

Extension needs to be enabled through Magento configuration and respects Allowed IPs option if used, which is great for tracing problems on live sites:

System->Configuration->Developer->Debug->FirePHP
System->Configuration->Developer->Developer Client Restrictions->Allowed IPs

After you enable FirePHP in Magento configuration you can start using it simple as

Mage::helper(‘firephp’)->send(‘Lorem ipsum sit amet ..’);
Mage::helper(‘firephp’)->debug(Mage::getModel(‘catalog/product’)->load(54));

Send function sends whatever you throw in it, while debug checks for Varien_Object instance and sends Varien_Object->debug() to console. If you’re dumping usual Magento objects, be sure to use debug.

We’re looking forward new FirePHP 1.0 announced for this year !!

Updated
0.0.3 – license change, Magento Connect release
0.0.2 – fixed compatibility problem in 1.3.2.x versions
0.0.1 – initial release

This is what the quote says:

Having duplicate content can affect your site in a variety of ways; but unless you’ve been duplicating deliberately, it’s unlikely that one of those ways will be a penalty. This means that:

* You typically don’t need to submit a reconsideration request when you’re cleaning up innocently duplicated content.
* If you’re a webmaster of beginner-to-intermediate savviness, you probably don’t need to put too much energy into worrying about duplicate content, since most search engines have ways of handling it.
* You can help your fellow webmasters by not perpetuating the myth of duplicate content penalties! The remedies for duplicate content are entirely within your control. Here are some good places to start.

We (SEO professionals) do understand that in this case there is no penalty for having duplicate content.

The problem is: Google doesn’t have to enforce any penalty, duplicate content is bad for you by default.

It’s actually pretty logical, let me explain:

You have a product page that can be reached via two different categories, which would create two different URLs with identical content:

• example.com/category1/product-name.html
• example.com/category2/product-name.html

Your store is sending the link juice (the PageRank value) to two of these URLs. If you only had one instead, it would receive double the amount of link juice.

Now imagine what happens if you have multiple products in multiple categories all over your store. How much link juice are you actually throwing away? A lot.

Different URLs when product is listed in multiple categories is just one of the cases in which Magento serves almost identical content on two different URLs. This is why Magento is not really on-site SEO perfect out of the box and you need someone to “make it right”.

In the recent release of Magento 1.4.0.0, there have been some on-site SEO improvements with the default theme, so I can see Magento team is working hard on getting Magento on-site SEO perfect.

Please note that Magento is not “bad” or “terrible” in on-site SEO, as the matter of fact, most of the other open source e-commerce solutions have much bigger SEO problems out of the box. We’re just trying to reach perfection here, and that’s why we advise you to solve the duplicate content problems at your Magento store.

New episode is featuring Toni Anicic;  our  marketing guy obsessed with Twitter

So I assume that you already instaled your language packs, and that you created diferent store views for diferent languages.
Next step is to go to Magento admin/system/configuration/developer.

There you must do two things:

• from current configuration scope select desired store view on witch the inline translation will be aplied
• apply inline translation for that desired store view

Next step is to go to the frontend and select desired language from the dropdown. Red rectagle strokes around text will apear and when you hover it the little book icon will apear. Just click on the icon and insert desired text.

Here is how to:

All translations that are been made by inline translation are stored in database in shop_core_translate table. If you move magento from server to server you need to export this table and import it when you configure your mysql database on another server.

I’ve seen people that are new to the concept of inbound marketing asking questions such as: Should I use Twitter? Should I blog? Should I use social bookmarks? Facebook? LinkedIn? Directories? SEO? SEM? SMM? Conversion rate optimization?

If only they knew that the time spent on asking these questions and reading through answers could be much better used on trying these things for themselves and seeing them work in action.

ROI, ROI, ROI.

The biggest mistake is trying to measure every single one of these elements of inbound marketing separately. Why, you ask?

Because, they work together. Instead of spending ridiculous amount of time on just figuring out how are you going to measure the ROI of each of these elements and then spending lots of time on actual measurement, you should look at all of these elements as one – Inbound Marketing.

All of the elements of inbound marketing work together as one, each making others stronger and more valuable in achieving the omnipresence. Because of this complex interaction between these elements it is almost impossible to measure the actual ROI of a single element in this mix.

“What is the ROI of spending a week on calculating the ROI?” [mp3]

- David Meerman Scott

Could you measure the ROI of 10 seconds it took me to write a tweet? Sure you could, but do you really want to?

• You first need to calculate how much 10 seconds of my time are expense to the company. Then you need to take several measurable factors into equation…
• Did we receive any new followers because of this tweet?
• What’s the monetary value of this particular follower (it’s not the same if you’re followed by a person with lots of money interested in your products / services or some random folk for example).
• Did this follower just found out about our other communication channels like our blog or LinkedIn account, group etc.?
• What’s the value of that follower being there?
• … and so on…

Even if you somehow managed to take all of the possible measurable elements to calculate the ROI of me spending 10 seconds to post this tweet, it would take such a ridiculous amount of time that this kind of measurement makes no sense.

Let’s say that after you did the miracle and managed to actually accurately measure this ROI, this follower we gained brought us a few extra followers. What do you do now? You go back to your ROI spreadsheets and make corrections?

You could have a legion of mathematicians working behind an inbound marketer and they wouldn’t be able to measure 10 seconds of his work in one day.

This is why I advise you to measure the Inbound Marketing as a whole and not every element of it separately otherwise your measurements will not be accurate.

If you take home one line from this text let it be: “The goal is omnipresence.”

Today, according to Google trends, Magento is more popular than ecommerce itself. Somewhere in March of 2009 – less then a year ago – terms “magento” and “ecommerce” became equal and from there on, Magento took the leading position.

Of course, this is not the whole truth, since ecommerce is used in many synonym forms such as “e-commerce”, however, Magento is still much stronger keyword then any of these synonyms individually.

If you look at the curve from the marketing perspective, you will notice that Magento shows significant and stable growth rate with no sign of decreasing or stagnating any time soon.

The graph at the bottom shows us there is significantly bigger amount of articles (or news references) about the term “ecommerce” then there is about “magento” and despite this, Magento still manages to attract more search traffic.

If we compare it to the competing platforms (Magento vs oscommerce vs virtuemart vs zencart) the graph shows us the clear winner is once again – Magento. Tomislav wrote about similar topic long time ago (What’s the best shopping cart).

There is your answer to the question from the title (How popular is Magento?) – a lot. To quote some of the real world numbers from Magento’s official website:

• $25 Billionin transactions
• 30,000+ merchants
• 1,700+ extensions
• 1.5 Million downloads

And counting.

To quote the great Governator:

…and an official mail sent to all google apps admins:

This is a quote from a polite blog post on discontinuing support for old browsers:

The web has evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these new features effectively. So to help ensure your business can use the latest, most advanced web apps, we encourage you to update your browsers as soon as possible.

Read the rest of their blog post and join the google wave of heading forward

However, sometimes you wont wish your extensions depend on the additional module for certain functionality. Stuff like “overriding” the admin view files can easily be achieved with just a few minor modifications of extended class.

Content of my app\code\community\MyCompany\MyModule\Block\Adminhtml\Catalog\Product\Helper\Form\Gallery\Content.php file.

class MyCompany_MyModule_Block_Adminhtml_Catalog_Product_Helper_Form_Gallery_Content extends Mage_Adminhtml_Block_Catalog_Product_Helper_Form_Gallery_Content
{
    /**
     * This method has been overridden merely for the purpose of setting up a new view file
     * to be used in place of the default theme folder.
     *
     * @see app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Mage_Core_Block_Template#fetchView($fileName)
     */
    public function fetchView($fileName)
    {
        extract ($this->_viewVars);
        $do = $this->getDirectOutput();

        if (!$do) { ob_start(); }

        include getcwd().'/app/code/community/MyCompany/MyModule/blocks/Adminhtml/catalog/product/helper/gallery.phtml';

        if (!$do) {$html = ob_get_clean(); }
        else { $html = ''; }

        return $html;
    }
}

Which goes inline with the config.xml file entry like:

...
<blocks>
	<adminhtml>
		<rewrite>
			<catalog_product_helper_form_gallery_content>MyCompany_MyModule_Block_Adminhtml_Catalog_Product_Helper_Form_Gallery_Content</catalog_product_helper_form_gallery_content>
		</rewrite>
	</adminhtml>
</blocks>
...

In the example below, I am pointing the block to look for my view file within my module folder, and not within some Magento design folder. Basically my gallery.phtml is the same as the original Magento adminhtml view file for the same purpose, but now I can go in and implement my additional stuff in it.

Approach like this can have its advantage in terms of keeping all the required overridden design files in your own module directory.

For those who need it… cheers.