Configuration

Sometimes we need to change some configuration preferences. Some things we can do from administration and some we can’t change by default. We speak about those challenging ones.

Extending “Contact us” functionality in Magento

By: Ivan Bernatovic, Last updated: Aug 28, 2023 | Published: Feb 24, 2016
Extending “Contact us” functionality in Magento

One of the most important aspects of any business is customer support. It is important to enable your customers to easily reach to you if they need to contact you.

Out of the box Magento offers nice form on “Contact us” page where customers can enter their info and submit support request without opening their email client and searching for your customer service email.

However, sometimes that’s not enough. Depending of your business type and size, you may want to split your customer support into departments to improve your efficiency of solving support requests.

Luckily, it’s not complicated so let’s start!

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Using Redis cache backend and session storage in Magento

By: Marko Martinovic, Last updated: Oct 23, 2019 | Published: Feb 17, 2014
Using Redis cache backend and session storage in Magento

Combined with the power of Zend Framework, Magento currently supports many cache backends with file system, APC and Memcached being the most widely used. Every supported cache backend brings it’s own set of upsides and downsides, but since there’s a lot to choose from, one could easily assume that as far as cache backends are concerned, Magento is very well covered. To some degree this might be true, but when you seriously up the number of requests, none of the cache backends scale well. Besides poor scaling, some of the cache backend implementations also suffer from serious limitations like not having support for grouping of related cache entries, a.k.a. tagging. With this in mind, and in order to provide support for stable and scalable cache backend, latest versions of Magento are turning to Redis key-value store. In this article I’ll do my best to describe process of implementing Redis as cache and session backend with recent versions of Magento Community and Enterprise Edition.

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Overriding Magento blocks, models, helpers and controllers

By: Damir Korpar, Last updated: Oct 02, 2019 | Published: May 29, 2013
Overriding Magento blocks, models, helpers and controllers

There is no project that uses framework as is. Every now and then there is a need to change something, to add something new or to override something already written. Due to many reasons it’s a bad habit and bad programming if core files are modified and it’s not recommended at all. Therefore Magento brought in an excellent way how to override/overwrite those files.

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Prepared filter for Magento admin grids

By: Ivan Galambos, Last updated: Aug 29, 2023 | Published: Oct 29, 2012
Prepared filter for Magento admin grids

Maybe you can ask yourself why do I need prepared data for filters in my collections – in Magento admin grids. Well, I can perhaps create new grid and action for some custom functionality and show such grid and then additionally do (filter by) whatever I need.

But notice that if you create such collection with some addFieldToFilter() method you always use specified filter for that collection.
If you are interested how to use only one collection for showing different results for that collection (prepared filter), keep reading.

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Magento: Date format troubles

By: Darko Goles, Last updated: Aug 29, 2023 | Published: Sep 24, 2012
Magento: Date format troubles © shadowkill@sxc.hu

In this post, I will just mention some of the issues with date format from my own experience, in hope that this will help somebody to save few hours of tracing Magento to find the solution :-).

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How to implement rel=prev and rel=next to Magento’s pagination?

By: Vanja Devcic, Last updated: Aug 29, 2023 | Published: Apr 13, 2012
How to implement rel=prev and rel=next to Magento’s pagination?

As most of you know that “When dealing with online stores with a lot of products, pagination on category pages can get really problematic for search engines” like Toni Anicic wrote in his article. I don’t want to repeat his words, but to show you how you can add rel=”prev” and rel=”next” link tag attributes in the head tag for pages, which will boost your SEO. This peace of code is already provided by Magento community, but this is improved version.

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How to add new custom category attribute in Magento

By: Vedran Subotic, Last updated: Aug 29, 2023 | Published: Mar 28, 2011
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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Programmatically change Magento’s core config data

By: Vedran Subotic, Last updated: Aug 29, 2023 | Published: Nov 28, 2010
Programmatically change Magento’s core config data

Every Magento installation has certain core configuration data already set. When you update those values from the administration interfaces, changes are saved mainly to core_config_data database table. It seems important and something that you shouldn’t touch, right? As always, there are times you will wish to get your hands on it. In some cases you will wish to chance settings directly from the code. This article demonstrates the proper way.

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