It’s that time of the year again – everyone in the world of Magento are getting ready for the biggest event evolving around world’s favorite eCommerce platform – Imagine Commerce 2015.
What can we expect this year and what are some of the hidden gems of the Imagine experience?
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UPDATE: The issue described in the following text has been taken care of in Magento EE 1.14 / CE 1.9
Recently, a pretty strange issue occurred on one of our projects. Our client reported that when trying to assign products to a category, only a thousand of products got saved while the other ones were ignored. To deal with this issue, I decided to jump to the category save action and check for any problems with the code that may cause this behaviour.
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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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How many Magento Certified Solution Specialists are there? Which country, city, solution partner hold the most badges and what are some of the trends that can be seen throughout the first 6 months of Magento’s latest official certification program? Check it out in the second State of Magento Solution Specialist Certification report by Inchoo.
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It is widely assumed that knowledge is power and that it has to be built upon every day. It takes a lot of time to put a person’s knowledge into a book. For the past few months I was looking for a new book in order to expand on my frontend knowledge.
Due to lack of free time I usually read only particular sections of some book or I surf the Internet if I need a specific piece of information.
Long story short, just at that time Andrea Sacca published his new book which covers one of my favorite topics – Creating responsive Magento theme. As one of the frontend developers at Inchoo, I had the opportunity to receive one of first copies of that book (and a copy for entire Inchoo). To return the favor to the author, we were asked to write a review of the book.
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We are all aware of the Magento codebase size and its complexity. That is one of the reasons most people use full-fledged IDEs for Magento programming. Most answers regarding the “what IDE should I be using for Magento?” or “what is the best Magento development environment?” include big boys like Eclipse, NetBeans and PhpStorm. Since you’ve already read the title, you may be wondering: “what can a text editor like Sublime Text offer me for my Magento development?”. Vanilla installation? Not much, but with the help of a few plugins, well… Keep reading and you just may be in for a treat.
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In Magento selectable grids, each time after a grid operation is performed (whether it’s filtering the results, pagination or something else), the selected values get lost. In other words, Magento by default keeps only values selected after the grid is initialized in the beginning and loses them each time the grid gets reloaded by Ajax call. Fortunately, Magento has a built-in library called Grid Serializer to solve this issue.
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This post describes how to add Magento products to Google Merchant Center (formerly known as Google Base) using a product feed and explains some of the issues you might encounter. This post used to be about adding Magento products to Google Base, but since Google swapped Google Base for Google Merchant Center, I revamped this article with up to date data.
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In this article, I will demonstrate how to write custom shipping in Magento, or to be more precise, two of them: standard shipping and express shipping, which is only available if none of your cart items exceeds specified weight threshold. Lets start by explaining how Magento handles shipping, and what would be needed to achieve our goal.
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We are now over two and a half months deep into Magento Solution Specialist certification that rolled out during this year’s Imagine eCommerce conference. So, it was about time to crunch some numbers – we bring you the first “State of Magento Solution Specialist Certification” report.
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If this was a series of articles, this would be the third one. If you previously read my articles on simple and configurable product creation in Magento, you already know the basics.
In this article we’ll expand our knowledge and learn how to create a bundle of products programmatically in Magento.
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If you have plans for a new eCommerce project on Magento, what better place to start than with a team of certified experts who can prepare you to make the most of this powerful platform? Magento Certified Solution Specialist is someone you’d want to have on your team early on.
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I already wrote about creating a simple product programmatically in Magento. For configurable product, however, things get a little bit complicated.
As you already know, a configurable product is merely a product with simple products that differ in some option (attribute) assigned to itself.
We can use this conclusion to extend our code for creation of simple products to work with configurable.
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Magento by default comes with a few basic product sorting options such as sorting by product position, name or price. In this article you’ll learn how to sort products by how many times they have been sold.
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Magento uses Prototype library to manage form validation. This comes in handy, because all you need to do when writing custom form is to assign a valid class names to your input fields, and pass the form id to VarienForm object.
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At one point or another, you might want to implement a payment method with credit card types that are not implemented in Magento by default.
Please note that in this article you’ll learn how to add a new credit card type and validate it only. This article does not cover the whole payment module creation.
In a development process, you often need some testing data you can use. Magento supplies you with it’s default Sample Data that contains some products. Thing is, they’re not of much use if you have some custom attributes added to your products, if you create your own attribute set, or a product type.
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Us developers love adding things programmatically. Even though you can create a new customer through a signup form, or via admin interface, in some cases, that might take too long.
If you need a bunch of customers assigned to different groups, from different countries, you might be better off doing this from the code.
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It was pointed out to me in one of the preceding articles that getting a product’s URL in a different store can get pretty complicated if the URL you want to get is rewritten. I decided to come up with a solution to that problem, as it could be useful in the future.
I came up with a method that returns a rewritten part (i.e. after rewrite) of a product’s URL. You’ll need to add base URL of a store to this return value to get a full URL (as shown on languages.phtml example).
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Editing products and changing their position in categories can be quite a task. This is especially true when you have a large number of products to edit or arrange, and some of them are very similar.
Sure, you could differentiate them by SKU, ID, price, or something else. But wouldn’t it be great if you had a thumbnail of each product in grid?
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Magento has its top menu reserved for category navigation. It’s pretty solid for displaying categories, even when there is a large number of them.
What some of the clients want is a vertical (sidebar) category menu, so they can display sibling categories of a category their customers are exploring.
In this article we’ll cover the creation of a full vertical menu. We’ll go 3 levels deep: category, subcategory, and sub-subcategory. You can always expand on this, but I believe 3 levels are more than enough for most stores.
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Magento announced its first business-oriented certification program at this year’s Imagine Conference. The Magento Solution Specialist Certification is now available to everyone. What does it entail, who is it for and is this a good step forward for Magento? Read on…
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Magento collections represent a very convenient way of grouping models together. We can grab a group of models from database with little to none sql code thanks to special methods which collection model provides. Collections can get really big (new products, customers, categories, lots of attributes etc.) and become really tricky to work with. Let’s see what can be done to make large collections more manageable.
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Bestseller products is one of the features people tend to ask about and look for when it comes to Magento. Default installation already has bestseller products option included…but these are static ones defined in a CMS page. We’re going to take it to the next level and automate it.
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Magento’s default catalog search can be a powerful tool. It’s versatility is something every customer can appreciate.
One of the coolest features of the built-in advanced search is the ability to search by attributes assigned to a product. But what if your client’s plans for search are a bit different, and advanced search is too cluttered for his or her needs?
Let’s say your client wants his customers to be able to search by brand or SKU, with all other fields removed from the search, and wishes for custom URL for each one of those search types.
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We all know how great Magento grids can be – there is no alternative when it comes to displaying data in a efficient manner.
Our clients sometimes (almost always) have specific requirements when it comes to Magento. One of them had a request to be able to filter the order grid by multiple order ID’s.
This can be useful if you have a number of orders you’d like to track – filtering them one by one can be tedious and time-consuming task.
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Reviews are another one of numerous excellent features in Magento. Usage of reviews can increase visitors’ trust in your brand, which, in return boosts your sales by a significant amount.
Sometimes there is a need for showing star ratings outside the products’ review page. That’s what I’ll be addressing with this article.
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Dropdown login forms are not a feature many online stores use, but in some cases they could be quite useful UX feature. In this tutorial, I will explain how to create such a dropdown in a few minutes!
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Building your own Magento modules (extensions) can be a tedious task. We always strive to develop everything ‘the Magento way’, which is why we frequently dig into the core to see how Magento’s Core team does things. Once in a while, we stumble upon useful features we think are useful and share them with you. One of such features is Magento’s notification system.
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Some clients have a need to show product on sale on homepage, or, sometimes, to filter products on sale in each category individually. In this post i’ll show you two ways of listing products on sale:
Let’s get to it!
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