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.


Taking control over module upgrade process

Taking control over module upgrade process

Every Magento developer has at least once encountered situation where long lasting module upgrade script caused issue for end customers. Or even worse, fail over and over, due to being executed multiple times.

Of course, there is a very simple solution for this. And since we have encountered many sites which do not use this approach, I have decided to share it with you.

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Extending “Contact us” functionality in Magento

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

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

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

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

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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Enhanced export – collection to a file

Enhanced export – collection to a file

Don’t let this tittle mislead you. This post is beginners guide that will explain how Magento’s method getCsvFile() works. We’ll explain some properties and advice you with some tips how to use some of the properties.

Probably you’re familiar with the error: “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of X bytes exhausted (tried to allocate Y bytes)…”. You’ll probably experience it if you don’t care about performance/memory limit sooner or later. If you want to know how to additionally avoid that error message, keep reading.

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Run methods that are specified in module’s xml file using XPath and Varien_Object

Run methods that are specified in module’s xml file using XPath and Varien_Object

For one client last year we needed to develop some custom ERP. In documentation client specified that they want to run some methods that are “defined” in config.xml using method’s code as a id in time of exporting their orders. Shortly, depending on payment code from order they wanted to add some custom calculation when they are exporting orders. If you are interested how we implemented this keep reading!

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Print message in all languages using single store, date on specified localization

Print message in all languages using single store, date on specified localization

Did you maybe try to print one message in “all” languages on a single page?

First, let me tell you when I needed to do that. Recently I needed to develop functionality that will send some “custom” emails. You already know that we can set transactional emails for each website / store view and have those emails translated in administration/db. Challenge in my case was that I needed to translate some “random” sentences in one transactional email so using predefined email template wasn’t possible. Sure that we can inject variables and/or objects into email templates, but that didn’t help in my case.

If you have installed any version of Magento community edition >= 1.4.2.0 we can start with our translate module.

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

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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