Tips

Keeping an eye on small things in eCommerce projects

Goran Bokun — Oct 31, 2017
Keeping an eye on small things in eCommerce projects

When managing projects, one usually focuses on big things: biggest costs, biggest features, biggest risks, etc. The same is with building an eCommerce site – the biggest, most important things are, well, most important.

But large topics are not the be-all and end-all of the project.

In this post, we will illustrate how tiny issues can have an outsized influence on the project. Through analysis of several examples from our experience, we will try to understand how small perturbations shape the course of the project.

So let’s start with something totally relevant, let’s start with – Napoleon.

Read more

Version control systems in UI design

Katarina Dijakovic — May 30, 2017
Version control systems in UI design

Our design team switched to working in Sketch a while ago but it wasn’t until version 43 we really started seeing some opportunities to change our workflows more significantly. It was also an opportunity for more designers to work on the same project as well as collaborate with developers more easily. If you’re looking for professional Magento web design services, feel free to check out our Magento Web Design Service for more information.

Read more

Magento functional testing with casper.js

Stanislav Mihic — Oct 30, 2013
Magento functional testing with casper.js

Testing can be boring and time consuming task. So why don’t we use some tools and make our lives easier? In Magento there are numerous “boring” tasks that need to be done after the first install and then again when you test a new functionality. For example, create a test account, add product to cart, go trough checkout process, add product to wishlist, compare etc.

Read more

Google Image indexing and Magento [robots.txt]

Drazen Karacic-Soljic — Dec 04, 2012
Google Image indexing and Magento [robots.txt]

There are many Magento robots.txt templates floating around, with tens of instructions for crawlers. Most of them deal with preventing crawlers to access some of many Magento’s directories. But sometimes these instructions can be too restrictive and might prevent Google from indexing your images.

Read more

Setup automatic per-folder subdomains on your local linux based computer

Thomas Spigel — Nov 20, 2012
rusek@sxc.hu © rusek@sxc.hu

WARNING: this is a fully linux-based tutorial. I’m pretty sure that this is possible on Micro$oft Windows and OS/X, but unfortunately I’m not using them, neither I know a good DNS server for them and the impact on XAMPP and MAMP.

As you probably already know, one of the main problems when you’re doing multiple projects is to organize them properly, first for fast local testing of changes, second for your own sake, to not get lost on your own computer.
One more problem are the testing local domains. Well, the easiest way when you create a project is to create a new project folder, put a new domain (and every subdomain you’ll use) into your /etc/hosts file, create a new virtual host in the apache config, run a2ensite #### (or however you enable a new site on your distribution), restart the webserver… Which means, you need to do that everytime when you’re creating a new project. Not a very convenient way if you ask me, as you’re bloating your /etc/hosts file and your Apache2 virtualHost file(s).

So, one day, I was thinking about that and looking for a solution for it. I’m sure there are a bunch of ways to get rid of this problem, and this solution which I’ll show you is how I managed to do it.

Read more

How to multiselect and filter in magento admin grids – IN and NOT IN

Ivan Galambos — Oct 28, 2012
How to multiselect and filter in magento admin grids – IN and NOT IN

Did you ever need to create grid in Magento administration that is filterable by more column’s values, i.e. something from multiselect drop-down. Or perhaps more specific, you want to export all pending orders (order status: pending, pending_payment, pending_paypal) but you aren’t satisfied with Magento implementation of selecting, searching and exporting one by one pending order status. If you’re interested how I implemented similar behavior with input text field, simulating MySQL “IN” and “NOT IN” statement, keep reading!

Read more

YouTube SEO – How to rank higher in YouTube search?

Toni Anicic — Oct 15, 2012
YouTube SEO – How to rank higher in YouTube search?

To this day little was known about YouTube’s search engine ranking factors compared to what we as an industry know about Google’s ranking factors. This is pretty sad since YouTube is the world’s 2nd largest search engine. There were lots of practical advice and wild guesses thrown out there from common sense but till now we had little actual data and case studies of YouTube optimization, and nothing even remotely similar to this data we have for Google.

Read more

Prevent PO Boxes in shipping address field on Checkout

Nikola Stojiljkovic — Oct 11, 2012
Prevent PO Boxes in shipping address field on Checkout © jechasteen@sxc.hu

We recently integrated a feature that would prevent users from creating an order with a PO Box in Australia. Since we are already familiar with Australia Post shipping integration (and heavy modifications of it, I might add :)), the first thing that came to mind is to have a look if there’s some API or web interface that can be used to filter out post codes that are linked to PO Boxes. Many high volume addresses and/or PO Boxes in Australia have their own post code, so it looked like an obvious solution. It turns out that it’s not that simple or logical, since there are many edge cases where you can not reliably tell if you should filter the code out or not. There is a guide made by Fontis that shows how to validate the input fields in order to filter out PO Boxes. However, in our case we had some dynamic content loading with Temando shipping method integrated. This guide is intended as a more general solution that is compatible with Checkout page’s dynamic content and third party Shipping methods integration like Temando.

Read more

Tracing Magento from “Export CSV” to “Save File – OK” button

Ivan Galambos — Aug 30, 2012
Tracing Magento from “Export CSV” to “Save File – OK” button

First of all, this post is beginners guide about tracing in Magento. I’ve created 2 parts. First one is about how to find important parts in Magento core app – I decided to explain exporting collections to CSV (this requirement you’ll need on almost every project) and in second part we’ll go through Magento getCsvFile() method and explain some properties there. This first one is basic and I’ll lead you through steps “how to trace” steps from exporting to download process in Magento. If you’re already familiar with steps that we’ll do feel free to skip this post and jump to Part 2.
If you’re relatively new to Magento and you are not so familiar how grid containers works in Magento and where is placed Export to: CSV Export button keep reading.

Read more

Enhance Magento 404 page

Stanislav Mihic — Jun 29, 2012
Enhance Magento 404 page

Magento default installation already has a predefined custom 404 page (no-route). But is it enough to help visitor/customer get back on right track!?. Let’s look over a few examples of custom designed 404 pages. http://centar-alata.hr/404, https://github.com/404, http://www.bluedaniel.com/404, http://www.casino-lemonade.com/404/ – as you can see, it can be funny, creative or you can take advantage of this “case” and try to engage potential customer. Here are a few quick and dirty ideas on how to reuse custom 404 page in Magento and try to serve specific content on it.

Read more