When a small web shop grows beyond that what was manageable by one person it is important to put down standard procedures and a structure of where everything is stored. How much inventory to keep and what is available. ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning, a big word for a small operation, becomes essential. There are plenty of open source packages available that provide inventory management and a whole range of other features. Most of these are overkill and require extensive staff training. Several do provide ; typically expensive ; bridges to Magento. But with Magento you already have an admin system you know how to use and a website, so why add another one?

Read the rest of this entry »

If you make your checkout procedure clearer and simpler you will convert more visitors into customers. This is the mantra behind the now numerous one page checkout modules for Magento. The standard Magento Checkout page is anything but simple. I have heard it described it as “the work of an accountant”. It works and it is pretty solid, but it does not look inviting. After reading about the cons and pro’s of a single checkout page we decided to test this for ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago I came across the Magento U Online Course “Fundamentals of Magento Development” and signed up at the spot. Given that its currently free it is extremely good value. Read the rest of this entry »

The following code is usefull if you would like to make an export of your Magento webstore products to the Dutch Beslist.NL website. It creates a text file in the format accepted by the Beslist.NL website.

The code is designed to be called from a nightly cron job. Execution can take little while, depending on how many products your store has. The script exports all enabled products. Read the rest of this entry »

I build this mini module for a webshop that needed a “free shipment” option for orders that are entered through the Magento Admin panel. Occasionally someone will pickup an order directly from the store, or a delivery is made “on the house”. It is however not an option offered to regular visitors to the website. Read the rest of this entry »

If you install an SSL certificate for your Magento website the checkout procedure is secure. The website will jump to a HTTPS page as soon as you click the “Order” button in the cart. However, the cart itself is not secure.

The little lock symbol on the webbrowser is not displayed. This is the correct behavior as the customer will not enter any confidential information until he or she enters the order form itself.

But your customer likely expects the website to enter secure mode as soon as they enter the shopping cart. This is a key reflection point for your visitors — do I trust this website with my confidential information? The SSL lock inside the address bar gives that extra bit of comfort that this is a proper website. Read the rest of this entry »

What do you have to do to make sure that one particular product is always on top in your Magento category ? This product is a key item and your marketing people want to make sure when someone visits the category they see it immediately.
Read the rest of this entry »

Beauty farm by Vincent Luigi Molino

This article descripes how to modify a default eAcellerator configuration for use with Magento. This is an advanced level topic. You have installed Magento on your own dedicated server and want to squeeze some more juice out of it. Because installing eACellerator requires you to install software on the server this cannot be done on a shared hosting server. Here your hosting provider will already have installed a similar solution. But as you will read below — this is likely a subobtimal boost to overal performance.

With so many PHP files to parse for each page Magento will be slow unless you are using a PHP accelerator & optimizer. As each PHP script is compiled it is stored in memory and on disk by the accelerator. On a subsequent load PHP no longer needs to compile the script, it can just load the already compiled version and start executing immediately.
Read the rest of this entry »

osCommerce shows a little grid of thumbnails of the subcategories available below a category. I wanted to achieve the same effect in Magento which is possible through a little modification of the category page view. The effect looks as shown in the following screenshot:

It makes use of the fact that you can add an little image to a Magento category through the administration panel:

To make this work you need to modify your theme a little. Copy the file

“/app/design/frontend/base/default/template/category/view.phtml”

to

“/app/design/frontend/default/_yourtheme/template/category/view.phtml”

and add the following code to the bottom of the file:

<?php
$_category  = $this->getCurrentCategory();
$collection = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->getCategories($_category->entity_id);
$helper     = Mage::helper('catalog/category');
?>
<div style="clear:both"></div>
<ul class="catimglist">
    <?php foreach ($collection as $cat):?>
                <?php if($_category->getIsActive()):?>
                <?php
                     $cur_category = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($cat->getId());
                     $_img = $cur_category->getImageUrl();
                ?>
                <li>
                   <a href="<?php echo $helper->getCategoryUrl($cat);?>">
                    <img src="<?php echo $_img?>" title="<?php $cat->getName(); ?>"/>
                    <DIV><?php echo $cat->getName();?></DIV>
                   </a>
                </li>
                <?php endif?>
    <?php endforeach;?>
</ul>

You also need to style the images a little, I used the following css which I added to

“/skin/frontend/default/_yourtheme/css/styles.css”

.catimglist li
{
text-align:center;
float: left;
width: 30%;
height: 120px;
}

This code is very basic and of course unless you are 100% sure that you will always have an image for the subcategory, a little default image might be appropriate.

Let me know if you have suggestions on how to improve on this!

Magento is big — huge in fact. I did a little counting and a basic Magento installation contains rougly five thousand sub directories, together containing some 35,000+ files.

When I started hacking my Magento directory I had to simplify my Linux command prompt to the bare essentials. Printing the current directory is no longer informative when it takes up two lines of your terminal!

The next problem came in trying to bring all this code into subversion. I managed to get it to work eventually, but it wasn’t pleasant.Each commit required checking endless directories that are essentially static.

Specifying ignore lists was a first improvement but not a real solution.

The good news is that you can safely ignore most of these directories when developing. Burried deep inside your installation are just a handful directories that you will frequently need to modify.

Since I wanted these deeply burried directories in source control, and at the same time have handy set of shortcuts for editing I created a development directory and in it several symbolic links to the directories.

Then I added this development directory to subversion, greatly reducing the overal complexity.

For linux this is:

mkdir development
cd development
ln -s ../magento/app/etc etc
ln -s ../magento/app/code/local local
ln -s ../magento/app/design/frontend/default/_yourtheme theme
ln -s ../magento/skin/frontend/default/_yourtheme theme skin
ln -s ../magento/index.html index.html
ln -s ../magento/.htaccess .htaccess


On Windows you can achieve the same by using the “mklink /d” command.

So there you are, Magento simplified to just four directories and a couple of essential files. Of course, depending on your own environment you might need more.

Did I miss anything here? Let me know !