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Programatically add bundle product to cart in Magento

Programatically add bundle product to cart in Magento

Sometimes, clients requirements exceed the defaults built into the Magento. Recently we came across a task that among other things required manipulation of bundle products in Magento. In order to help my coworker Tomas I wrote this little code snippet that programatically adds bundle product to cart.

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Magento: How to import additional images for products

Magento: How to import additional images for products

We did a migration from CRE LOADED (osCommerce clone) to Magento and we had to import all products with additional images. Every products had from 4 to 6 images which was a problem because Magento doesn’t have built-in ability to upload multiple images for products.

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This is why SEO ranking reports are useless

This is why SEO ranking reports are useless

A quick question: is it possible to be ranked number one and number two hundred on Google for a certain keyword? A quick answer: Yes it is.

Google’s ranking algorithm has changed so much in the past few years that SEOs that have been living under the rock for the past few years can’t optimize your site anymore. It is now a common knowledge among the real SEO professionals that ranking has been dead for a long time.

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Bulk disable multiple Magento products

Bulk disable multiple Magento products

With all its ORM, model, resource and so on greatness, sometimes platform limitations are too obvious in Magento when it comes to large number of products in store. Recently I faced a simple task, I needed to disable around 6500 products in Magento that were assigned to a single category called “Inactive Products”. Given that it was an import from old system to Magento it is irrelevant why one would use category “Inactive Products” instead of just setting their status to “disabled”. My point is, whats the fastest way to do a bulk action on large number of products.

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What is gobbledygook?

What is gobbledygook?

If you are among the #IMU crowd, you probably have the word “gobbledygook” stuck in your head since one of the famous sentences spam bots like to write over at #IMU hashtag on Twitter is citation of David Meerman Scott

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Zend Framework Custom View Helper

Zend Framework Custom View Helper

Creating custom helper in new Zend Framework edition 1.9 in few easy steps.
Let’s assume that we need to fetch some data from database
but we do not need them in all view files.

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Why do you need a blog on your online store?

Why do you need a blog on your online store?

If you are an online store owner that ever went seeking advice on promoting your website and gaining more targeted visitors, you’ve probably heard you need a blog. You might wonder how does blog actually help you in gaining more visitors and ultimately earn more money with your online store.

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White hat SEO link building campaign is impossible

White hat SEO link building campaign is impossible

I’ve seen lots of SEO companies offering link building services and some of them claiming they are white-hat SEOs. I’d like to explain why link building campaign is never white hat SEO. It’s always in some gray area and often completely black hat.

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Magento Hello world module (extension)

Magento Hello world module (extension)

Previously I already wrote how to build custom module (extension) in Magento. Here is a new, refreshed article on that subject.

We will start by creating a simple “Hello world” module. However, you will soon see that simple takes a new meaning with Magento. Creating a bare bone module requires at least two files in Magento. For your module to work you need /app/etc/modules/MyCompany_MyModule.xml, app/code/local/MyCompany/MyModule/etc/config.xml. But, barebone module will not give you a “Hello developer” 🙂 -So, we need to add few more files to the game.

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How to make TinyMCE work with Magento CMS pages

How to make TinyMCE work with Magento CMS pages

Latest version of Magento, as of time of this writing, is 1.3.2.3. Latest, as well as previous versions come with “half-packed” support for TinyMCE editor. There are however few bugs and few steps that need to be handled in order to enable wysiwyg editing in CMS pages. Personally I am not that big of a fan of wysiwyg editors, mostly because I am developer and like to know what I write down.

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Why are intro pages bad for your SEO

Why are intro pages bad for your SEO

Intro pages also known as splash pages are pages that most often serve as a welcome message on a website’s homepage. Intro pages are usually made using flash technology or featuring one big image.

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Remove SID query from Magento URLs

Remove SID query from Magento URLs

Many people wonder why sometimes the SID part appears in their Magento URLs. This is when your URL has additional SID query usually at the end. Take a look at the image. The curiosity is that it does not appear always. What is the most common scenario it happens? You didn’t access the site with the same domain variant you entered as your “Base URL” in your System> Configuration> Web interface.

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Zend framework notification system

Zend framework notification system

I was playing around with admin interface for one custom project and I wanted general notification system for updating, adding, deleting records in database or any other action I could imagine. Zend framework has built in notification system where you can easily call the following helper (it’s an controller action helper). I hope this code will help somebody.

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What’s up with web developers and coffee?

What’s up with web developers and coffee?

If you are a web developer or have had an honor to work with one of these creatures, you probably noticed their strange addiction to coffee. Developers surrounding me start their day by drinking the morning coffee before the working hours start, then, at the beginning of their working day they make one in the office. They drink numerous cups of coffee during the working day, and when they go out for a break they order… guess what… coffee.

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Programatically create Magento blocks and inject them into layout

Programatically create Magento blocks and inject them into layout

Imagine a scenario where you wish to simply create a view file like custom-note.phtml and show this view file on some new url inside the Magento store. One way to do this is to create a CMS page and call that block from within CMS page. But what if you wish to create and append this block to other areas of Magento layout that are inaccessible from CMS page interface form admin? What if I want to add new div element under the breadcrumbs and append new block under it?

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Updating options of configurable product that is already in the cart

Updating options of configurable product that is already in the cart

Let’s say we have configurable Magento product in shopping cart and we want to update its
options without deleting product from cart and adding it again.

That’s quite easy to achieve with following steps, however I can’t write complete tutorial here so
you should be a little more familiar with Magento in order to make it work.

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Magento custom emails

Magento custom emails

Ever wanted to “just send the email” using the built in email features in Magento? Ever hit the wall trying to do something with Magento? OK, I know the answer to the other one, just had to ask :). Anyhow, sending the emails with Magento turned out to be a process of “just” a few hours of tracing Magento code.

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Internal link structure – PageRank flow change

Internal link structure – PageRank flow change

Internal link structure of a website is of grate importance in terms of SEO. Well architecture link structure was always able to do SEO miracles. The internal linking technique SEO’s use in order to get a better ranking for some terms is called PageRank Sculpting.

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Flash Google maps to embed

Flash Google maps to embed

Long time ago when Google released Google Maps API for Flash, i created small flash which i embedded on multiple sites. I thought it looks nicer that usual javascript version, maybe you will too.

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Removing Product Comparison in Magento

Removing Product Comparison in Magento

As many things in Magento, removing product comparison is not available thru the admin interface. Thus, leaving us with the only option of getting down and dirty with theme files editing.

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We have a new design

We have a new design

Bye bye old site! Today we launched a new design where we wanted to make the text more readable, interesting and also we wanted to invite you, our dear visitors to contact us if you need some help with your projects.  We do hope you will like the new design as much as we do.  Inchoo has over 21.000 monthly visitors according to Google Analytics and a 15-30% monthly growth. We hope this trend will continue in the future and that you will keep coming back.

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Forums and Social Media Marketing

Forums and Social Media Marketing

For the past few days there has been some open discussions around the web professional communities about the role of forums in modern internet marketing. It appears that new marketers strongly underestimate the power of forums and look at them as an old marketing tool that will soon be extinct.

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How to SEO optimize PDF files

How to SEO optimize PDF files

I have recently stumbled upon a few nice discussions on how to optimize PDF files for search engines so I decided to sum up the knowledge into one blog post.

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Etrgovina ecommerce conference

Etrgovina ecommerce conference

Inchoo team attended a great ecommerce conference called “Etrgovina“. This was the 9th time this conference was organized and it lasted for three days. It was held on Palic lake in Serbia.

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Access denied in Magento admin

Access denied in Magento admin

Some of you may encountered this problem. You install new Magento extension through downloader, try to access its configuration settings and Magento throws “Access denied” page at you. Although you’re administrator of the system.

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23+ Ways to Promote Your Website for Free

23+ Ways to Promote Your Website for Free

There is actually no such thing as free website promotion unless you are really lucky. You always have to invest at least some time and effort, and as we all know time equals money which means no promotion is actually free.

However, if you are looking into ways to promote your website online while not spending any money, here are some ways you can do it. Most of these are generally well known but you might find something new and useful.

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