Inchoo's Blog

dotProject – Open Source Project Management for free

Branko Ajzele — Nov 15, 2008

Dev Talk

dotProject – Open Source Project Management for free

Notice the word free in the title. If something is declared as open source this does not imply it should be free. Take a look at FogBugz. It is, one of the best open source project tracking tools currently available. However it’s quite expensive. Maybe not so expensive to larger companies but for small businesses and freelancers it sure is.

Yesterday I came across dotProject tool. If you are like me and came to PHP from .Net world then your first though might be that this is .Net application due to the “dot” in the title. Well, it isn’t, it’s a PHP powered collaboration tool.

Custom price filter in Magento

Branko Ajzele — Nov 03, 2008

Quite a few people have asked me for a price filter functionality that comes with Magento. Mostly, the questions are same: How does one put the price filter anywhere on the page? How does one set it’s on price ranges in that filter? What defines default price ranges. Is it possible to set price filter for all my products instead of just single category? Lot of questions. The answer might be simpler then you might think.

There are two ways to approach this problem. Head trough wall or stop and think approach.

How to track internal site search with Google Analytics?

Toni Anicic — Oct 31, 2008

Did you know that you can actually track what your visitors are searching for inside your website? We are going to explain you how it’s done via Google’s Analytics tool. It is possible to track your internal site searches if your internal search engine passes the search term in the query string as Google Analytics tracks everything entered in location bar of user’s browser.

Kapitol Reef :: Magento store with 1 product

Tomislav Bilic — Oct 28, 2008

Can an online store have only one product? Sure it can and we give you the one that just launched. Kapitol Reef was founded to develop, perfect, manufacture and market a new breed of snorkels based upon pressure-balanced breathing in the aquatic environment. The entire focus for this company is to deliver best-of-class products, starting with the snorkel. Kapitol Reef is in the market for many years and this week they published a new site. Similar to our work on Teraflex project, we used WordPress and Magento platforms for the development.

How to add login form to home page in Magento

Branko Ajzele — Oct 21, 2008

I found a interesting question on Magento forums. There was a request to add a login page to a home page. I guess somebody wants to show a products only to a registered customers. Here is a quick guide how to do it.

Magento MySQL database diagram

Tomislav Bilic — Oct 20, 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?

Making use of Magento getSingleton method

Branko Ajzele — Oct 09, 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.

UPS API Quest

Tomislav Bilic — Sep 30, 2008

Dev Talk

I got one fairly simple request to develop a custom shipping calculation for Magento that will use some special calculation using UPS API. Right now, Magento only calculates weight and the client needs something more advanced. I worked on similar stuff before, so I guessed this will not be much different. First step was to find an API for UPS. Well, this post is all about the search for API. I’ll update it when I manage to find it.

Manual creation of Google Sitemap in Magento

Tomislav Bilic — Sep 09, 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.

Our first Magento Store :: TeraFlex Suspensions

Tomislav Bilic — Aug 22, 2008

After many weeks of work, our 1st Magento project hit the Web: TeraFlex Suspensions. As the purpose of the site in not primarily selling, but also branding and community development, we decided to use WordPress and Magento combination to accomplish the client’s goals.

FogBugz – Project Management Tool

Tomislav Bilic — Jul 23, 2008

Dev Talk

Working on a project as only developer having direct contact with the client gives you the freedom not to think too much of a communication tool you will use. Couple of meetings, phone calls and an email will be just fine. After 3-4 weeks, you deliver the project and the communication is over. If that is your common scenario, than skip evaluation of this tool.

Featured products on Magento frontpage

Tomislav Bilic — Jul 22, 2008

Note: This is one of our older posts that describes how to add featured product to the Magento home page. Meanwhile, we developed a Magento Community extension: Featured Products by Inchoo. We advise you to use it with Magento Connect in case you need featured products functionality.

Designer’s Guide to Magento PDF download

Tomislav Bilic — Jun 06, 2008

After many developed CRE Loaded’s online stores and watching Magento development progress for quite some time, I decided it was time to use Magento with my next client. My starting point for development was official Designer’s guide. I’m the type of guy who likes to have documents nice&clean, so I tried to print it but print was a mess. That’s when I decided to create PDF of the official documentation for easy print. This is probably the best starting tutorial for creating a fresh new Magento template.

FancyBox – Fancy image zooming tool

Tomislav Bilic — Jun 04, 2008

Dev Talk

There are many Lightbox clones this days. Some are fancier, some are lighter, some use jQuery, some do not. In this wast set of options, I found one I think I will prefer from today: FancyBox – fancy image zooming tool

It is based on jQuery and is a cool alternative to existing solutions. Here are some features: