Tag Archives: Magento

Magento LightSpeed Extension – Review

Magento LightSpeed Extension – Review

In the last 7 years of my involvement with web development I have had an opportunity to open a great number of different “boxes“ when looking for web site improvement. After opening these “boxes” things often didn’t seem as it was specified – luckily this is not a case with Magento Lightspeed extension : ) Read more

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Magento L.E.S.S.

Magento L.E.S.S.

Sometimes its all about title, right?! So, what is LESS? Well, its my fancy acronym for something utterly simply but very practical. It stands for (L)ocalhost (E)mail (S)erver (S)imulator. Basically its neither email server or simulator in the real sense of word. Its just a little trick you can apply on the “app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Email/Template.php” file to compensate for lack of the local email server in your development environment while developing for Magento. Read more

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Why are you switching to Magento?

Why are you switching to Magento?

“Hello! I run an online store for a few years. It was developed in osCommerce originally and that’s why the sales suck. I would like you guys to move my shop to Magento. I heard a lot of good things about it and I’m sure that once we move there, our sales will skyrocket.” This is simplified version of a talk I had few days ago.
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Misuse of helper classes in Magento?

Misuse of helper classes in Magento?

In its MVC structure, Magento allows you to throw in additional classes that might not fit in strictly under the MVC “letters”. One example of these classes are helper classes. These are usually used to isolate a certain, possibly useful, algorithm. Algorithm whose usage would be overhead to write a model as it is more static and general in nature, meaning there is no point in applying it to given instance of an object. Read more

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How to extend Magento core controller?

How to extend Magento core controller?

Hi, today I’ll show you how to edit Magento’s core module without messing with core files themselves, or “the right way of doing things”. :D Read more

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Automated testing of Magento with Watir

Automated testing of Magento with Watir

Few months ago I was attending this web conference where among various topic one covered the “Automated testing”. To be honest I never looked into any “automated testing” tools until then. This was the first time I heard about this tool called Watir. Shortly put, Watir (pronounced water), is an open-source (BSD) family of Ruby libraries for automating web browsers. Read more

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Keeping your Magento fit with built in profiler

Keeping your Magento fit with built in profiler

Default Magento installation has this great feature called “Profiler” that can play important role with your custom Magento development. This feature is meant to be be used for developer only. If used properly it can help you get valuable information of certain code parts during development. Read more

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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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