Extensions

Number of extensions are increasing daily on Magento Connect. We created or reviewed some of those. You can read the details here.


Creating EAV based model(s) in Magento

Creating EAV based model(s) in Magento

Magento EAV (Entity Attribute Value) data model is used to get flexibility for your data, but it brings more complexity than relation table model. If you need data model that will have flexible attributes which can be dynamically added, for example from Magento admin panel, then EAV is the best solution for you. If using EAV, you don’t need to change table structure for every new attribute like you do on flat tables (creating new colums).

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Tracking Magento “add product to cart” action for analytic software purpose

Tracking Magento “add product to cart” action for analytic software purpose

Recently I have been working on a Magento extension for a 3rd party customer analytics and targeting web service, think Google Analytics alternative. One of the eCommerce tracking features that needed to be implemented was the “add product to cart” action. Since these kind of tracking services use JavaScript to trigger their tracking code, it’s up to us to see where and when will be embed certain tracking JavaScript in Magento. What’s interesting about “add product to cart” action is that it’s not your usual web page on which you land and are then in possibility to execute certain JavaScript.

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How to add custom product relations in Magento

How to add custom product relations in Magento

Currently there are three types of product relations in Magento: Up-sells, Related Products, and Cross-sell Products. Recently while discussing client’s requirements, we’ve come to conclusion it would serve our purpose best to link products in the same way Magento does, and then use our own relations independently of Magento’s built in product relations. In this article I’ll show you how to add custom product relations as addition to existing Magento product relations.

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How to setup GIT for Magento extension development

How to setup GIT for Magento extension development

The idea behind this article is to show how we can use GIT for Magento extension development. What we want to achieve is a git repository that contains only the files specific to our extension, and not the entire Magento. This kind of repository can then easily be pushed to GitHub or other remote public repository so that entire community benefits from your work.

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Inchoo Flickr Gallery Magento Extension

Inchoo Flickr Gallery Magento Extension © By Wholtone (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Inchoo Flick Gallery is an easy-to-use Magento extension that will integrate any Flickr gallery into your Magento website. It is fully customizable using a simple Magento back-end configuration page and it uses Flickr API to get all the required information and data. Extension is tested on Magento 1.6 and 1.7 but it’s still the first version so be careful if you decide to use it on your live site.

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Geocoding Customer Addresses in Magento via Google Maps

Geocoding Customer Addresses in Magento via Google Maps

Geocoding is the process of finding associated geographic coordinates (often expressed as latitude and longitude) from other geographic data, such as street addresses, or zip codes (postal codes)… so says Wikipedia. Geocoding an address is pretty simple if you are using Google Maps API. Since all we do here is Magento, let me show you how easily you can geocode customer address.

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How to add new custom category attribute in Magento

How to add new custom category attribute in Magento

Sometimes you need to extend functionality of Magento categories. There is several ways to do that, I will show you how it can be done.
You can do that by modifying and adding data into some of tables directly, but it can be waste of time if you don’t know what you are doing.
This post will describe how you can add new custom category attribute in your Magento store via sql_setup script.

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How you could serve static content files from your Magento extension folder

How you could serve static content files from your Magento extension folder

As a part of my personal ongoing “unobtrusive Magento extensions” campaign. I will show you another “hack”/approach you can apply in order to squeeze your static files under the main extension folder.

When I say static, I am mainly referring to images, CSS and JavaScript in this case.

For example, imagine you are coding an extension called “Sociable“, which will display several links to various web services like Twitter, GoogleBuzz, etc. Links that you can click and the publish a short message about a product/category on that web service. Something like on the image shown below. Logical question is, where do you store your images?

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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 : )

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How to activate/deactivate Magento module per a website level

How to activate/deactivate Magento module per a website level

First off let me just clearly say that I am not talking about just activating/deactivating a module output per a website level. Module output merely disables toHtml() method that certain module block class implements. In this article I am talking about fully deactivating the module like when we open the modules config xml file and place <active>true</active>.

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