inchoo's magento posts

September 8th, 2009 Published by: inchoo Created using zinepal.com. Go online to create your own zines or read what others have already published. 1 Inchoo's Magento Posts You're reading the 200th blog post edition of Inchoo's Magento e-book. It collects all of our blog posts on Magento. We want to thank everyone for staying with us so far and hope we will live to see 1000th blog post anniversary. :) Inchoo is an ecommerce design and development company specialized in building Magento online stores. Boost the speed of your Magento One of the drawbacks of Magento is currently its speed if default configuration is used. There are certain ways of making it run faster. The best one is to enable GZip compression by changing .htaccess file a little. You just need to uncomment part of the code. In my case, the speed increase was exactly 235%. Add custom structural block / reference in Magento | Inchoo If you already performed some Magento research, you will know that it is built on a fully modular model that gives great scalability and flexibility for your store. While creating a theme, you are provided with many content blocks that you can place in structural blocks. If you are not sure what they are, please read Designer’s Guide to Magento first. Magento provides few structural blocks by default and many content blocks. This article tells what needs to be in place to create new structural block. What are structural blocks? They are the parent blocks of content blocks and serve to position its content blocks within a store page context. Take a look at the image below. These structural blocks exist in the forms of the header area, left column area, right column…etc. which serve to create the visual structure for a store page. Our goal is to create a new structural block called “newreference”. Step 1: Name the structural block Open the file layout/page.xml in your active theme folder. Inside you will find lines like: <block type="core/text_list" name="left" as="left"/> <block type="core/text_list" name="content" as="content"/> <block type="core/text_list" name="right" as="right"/> Let’s mimic this and add a new line somewhere inside the same block tag. <block type="core/text_list" name="newreference" as="newreference"/> Good. Now we told Magento that new structural block exists with the name “newreference”. Magento still doesn’t know what to do with it. Step 2: Tell Magento where to place it We now need to point Magento where it should output this new structural block. Let’s go to template/page folder in our active theme folder. You will notice different layouts there. Let’s assume we want the new structural block to appear only on pages that use 2-column layout with right sidebar. In that case we should open 2columns-right.phtml file. www.besthosting4magento.com September 8th, 2009 Published by: inchoo Created using zinepal.com. Go online to create your own zines or read what others have already published. 2 Let’s assume we wish the “newreference” block to be placed below 2 columns, but above the footer. In this case, our updated file could look like this: <! start middle > <div class="middle-container"> <div class="middle col-2-right-layout">< ?php getChildHtml('breadcrumbs') ?> <! start center > <div id="main" class="col-main"><! start global messages > < ?php getChildHtml('global_messages') ?> <! end global messages > <! start content > < ?php getChildHtml('content') ?> <! end content ></div> <! end center > <! start right > <div class="col-right side-col">< ?php getChildHtml('right') ?></div> <! end right ></div> <div>< ?php getChildHtml('newreference') ?></div> </div> <! end middle > Step 3: Populating structural block We have the block properly placed, but unfortunately nothing is new on the frontsite. Let’s populate the new block with something. We will put new products block there as an example. Go to appropriate layout XML file and add this block to appropriate place. <reference name="newreference"> <block type="catalog/product_new" name="home.product.new" template="catalog/product/new.phtml" /> </reference> That’s it. I hope it will help someone There are 15 comments How to delete orders in Magento? | Inchoo You got a Magento project to develop, you created a Magento theme, you placed initial products and categories and you also placed some test orders to see if Shipping and Payment methods work as expected. Everything seems to be cool and the client wishes to launch the site. You launch it. When you enter the administration for the first time after the launch, you will see all your test orders there. You know those should be deleted. But how? If you try to delete orders in the backend, you will find out that you can only set the status to “cancelled” and the order is still there. Unfortunately, Magento doesn’t enable us to delete those via administration, so you will not see any “Delete order” button. This can be quite frustrating both to developers and the merchants. People coming from an SAP world find the inability to delete to have some merit but there should be a status that removes the sales count from the reports i.e. sales, inventory, etc. SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0; TRUNCATE `sales_order`; TRUNCATE `sales_order_datetime`; TRUNCATE `sales_order_decimal`; TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity`; TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_datetime`; TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_decimal`; TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_int`; TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_text`; TRUNCATE `sales_order_entity_varchar`; TRUNCATE `sales_order_int`; TRUNCATE `sales_order_text`; TRUNCATE `sales_order_varchar`; TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote`; TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote_address`; TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote_address_item`; TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote_item`; TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote_item_option`; TRUNCATE `sales_flat_order_item`; TRUNCATE `sendfriend_log`; TRUNCATE `tag`; TRUNCATE `tag_relation`; TRUNCATE `tag_summary`; TRUNCATE `wishlist`; TRUNCATE `log_quote`; TRUNCATE `report_event`; ALTER TABLE `sales_order` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_datetime` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_decimal` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_datetime` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_decimal` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_int` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_text` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_entity_varchar` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_int` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_text` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_order_varchar` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote_address` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote_address_item` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote_item` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_quote_item_option` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sales_flat_order_item` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `sendfriend_log` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `tag` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `tag_relation` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `tag_summary` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `wishlist` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `log_quote` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `report_event` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; reset customers TRUNCATE `customer_address_entity`; TRUNCATE `customer_address_entity_datetime`; TRUNCATE `customer_address_entity_decimal`; TRUNCATE `customer_address_entity_int`; TRUNCATE `customer_address_entity_text`; TRUNCATE `customer_address_entity_varchar`; TRUNCATE `customer_entity`; TRUNCATE `customer_entity_datetime`; TRUNCATE `customer_entity_decimal`; TRUNCATE `customer_entity_int`; TRUNCATE `customer_entity_text`; TRUNCATE `customer_entity_varchar`; TRUNCATE `log_customer`; TRUNCATE `log_visitor`; TRUNCATE `log_visitor_info`; ALTER TABLE `customer_address_entity` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_address_entity_datetime` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_address_entity_decimal` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_address_entity_int` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_address_entity_text` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_address_entity_varchar` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_entity` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_entity_datetime` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; September 8th, 2009 Published by: inchoo Created using zinepal.com. Go online to create your own zines or read what others have already published. 3 ALTER TABLE `customer_entity_decimal` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_entity_int` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_entity_text` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `customer_entity_varchar` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `log_customer` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `log_visitor` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; ALTER TABLE `log_visitor_info` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; Reset all ID counters TRUNCATE `eav_entity_store`; ALTER TABLE `eav_entity_store` AUTO_INCREMENT=1; SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1; After you have it executed, the test orders will not be in the database any more. Keep in mind that this will delete ALL orders, in the database. So, you should execute this queries immediately after launch. connect2MAGE | WordPress plugin for easy Magento database connection Hi everyone. I wrote this little plugin while working on one of our projects. If you know your way around WordPress then you know what $wpdb variable stands for. Imagine the following scenario. You have WordPress installation on one database, Magento on another. You know your way around SQL. You can always make new object based on WPDB class inside your template files giving it database access parameters, or you can use this plugin and use $MAGEDB the same way you use $wpdb. Below is a little example of using $MAGEDB to connect to Magento database and retrieve some products by reading id’s from custom field of some post inside your WordPress. Place this code inside one of your templates, like single.php. < ?php global $MAGEDB; $MAGEDB->show_errors(true); /** BASIC SETUP */ //$storeUrl = 'http://server/shop/index.php/'; $storeUrl = get_option('connect2MAGE_StoreUrl'); //$urlExt = '.html'; $urlExt = get_option('connect2MAGE_UrlExt'); /** END OF BASIC SETUP */ $entityIds = get_post_custom_values(get_option('connect2MAGE_CustomFieldName')); $result = array(); if(!empty($entityIds)) { $entityIds = $entityIds[0]; $sql = "SELECT `e`.*, `_table_price`.`value` AS `price`, IFNULL(_table_visibility.value, _table_visibility_default.value) AS `visibility`, IFNULL(_table_status.value, _table_status_default.value) AS `status`, `_table_url_key`.`value` AS `url_key`, IFNULL(_table_name.value, _table_name_default.value) AS `name` FROM `catalog_product_entity` AS `e` INNER JOIN `catalog_product_entity_decimal` AS `_table_price` ON (_table_price.entity_id = e.entity_id) AND (_table_price.attribute_id='99') AND (_table_price.store_id=0) INNER JOIN `catalog_product_entity_int` AS `_table_visibility_default` ON (_table_visibility_default.entity_id = e.entity_id) AND (_table_visibility_default.attribute_id='526') AND _table_visibility_default.store_id=0 LEFT JOIN `catalog_product_entity_int` AS `_table_visibility` ON (_table_visibility.entity_id = e.entity_id) AND (_table_visibility.attribute_id='526') AND (_table_visibility.store_id='1') INNER JOIN `catalog_product_entity_int` AS `_table_status_default` ON (_table_status_default.entity_id = e.entity_id) AND (_table_status_default.attribute_id='273') AND _table_status_default.store_id=0 LEFT JOIN `catalog_product_entity_int` AS `_table_status` ON (_table_status.entity_id = e.entity_id) AND (_table_status.attribute_id='273') AND (_table_status.store_id='1') INNER JOIN `catalog_product_entity_varchar` AS `_table_url_key` ON (_table_url_key.entity_id = e.entity_id) AND (_table_url_key.attribute_id='481') AND (_table_url_key.store_id=0) INNER JOIN `catalog_product_entity_varchar` AS `_table_name_default` ON (_table_name_default.entity_id = e.entity_id) AND (_table_name_default.attribute_id='96') AND _table_name_default.store_id=0 LEFT JOIN `catalog_product_entity_varchar` AS `_table_name` ON (_table_name.entity_id = e.entity_id) AND (_table_name.attribute_id='96') AND (_table_name.store_id='1') WHERE (e.entity_id in (".$entityIds.")) AND (_table_price.value >= 0 and _table_price.value < = 999999999999) AND (IFNULL(_table_visibility.value, _table_visibility_default.value) in (2, 4)) AND (IFNULL(_table_status.value, _table_status_default.value) in (1)) AND (_table_url_key.value not in ('P1FHN3G0LRWGMYZ3')) AND (IFNULL(_table_name.value, _table_name_default.value) not in ('P1FHN3G0LRWGMYZ3'))"; $result = $MAGEDB->get_results($sql); var_dump($result); } else { echo '<p class="relatedProductInfo">No related products available </p>'; } ?> < ?php if (!empty($result)): ?> <table id="relatedProductsList"> < ?php foreach ($result as $item): ?> <tr class="productInfo"> <td><a href="<?php echo $storeUrl ?>/< ?php echo $item->url_key ?>< ?php echo $urlExt ?>">< ?php echo $item->name ?></a></td> <td>< ?php _e('Starting at') ?> $ < ?php echo floatval($item->price) ?></td> </tr> < ?php endforeach; ?> </table> < ?php endif; ?> Hope some of you find this useful. Especially those who refuse to use Web Services for connecting different systems. Download connect2MAGE WordPress plugin. There are 6 comments Custom checkout cart - How to send email after successful checkout in Magento | Inchoo Recently I have been working on a custom checkout page for one of our clients in Sweden. I had some trouble figuring out how to send default Magento order email with all of the order info. After an hour or so of studying Magento core code, here is the solution on how to send email after successful order has been made. Not sure how useful this alone will be for you, so I’ll throw a little advice along the way. When trying to figure how to reuse Magento code, separate some time to study the Model classes with more detail. Then “tapping into” and reusing some of them should be far more easier. Latest News RSS box in Magento using Zend_Feed_Rss | Inchoo You would like to have a eCommerce power of Magento, but also have a blog to empower your business? In this case, you probably know that Magento doesn’t have some article manager in the box. Many clients seek for supplementary solution like Wordpress to accomplish this goal. Ok, so you created a blog on same or different domain and you would like those articles to appear somewhere in Magento (probably sidebar). This article will explain how to do it. Let’s create a file called latest_news.phtml in app/design/frontend/default/[your_theme]/template/ callouts/latest_news.phtml Now we will create a PHP block that will display the list of articles from RSS feed. We will use Inchoo RSS for demonstration purposes. In your scenario, replace it with your own valid RSS URL. < ?php $channel = new Zend_Feed_Rss('http://feeds.feedburner.com/Inchoo'); ?> <div class="block block-latest-news"> <div class="block-title"> <h2>< ?php echo $this->__('Latest News') ?></h2> </div> <div class="block-content"> September 8th, 2009 Published by: inchoo Created using zinepal.com. Go online to create your own zines or read what others have already published. 4 <ol id="graybox-latest-news"> < ?php foreach ($channel as $item): ?> <li><a href="<?php echo $item->link; ?>">< ?php echo $item->title; ?></a></li> < ?php endforeach; ?> </ol> </div> </div> Step 2 Now, we should decide where to place it. I assume you already know how Magento blocks and references work. Let’s assume you would like to place it in right column by default for whole catalog. In this case open your app/design/frontend/default/ [your_theme]/layout/catalog.xml file and under “default” tag update “right” reference with something similar. That’s it. You should be able to see the list of articles from RSS feed with the URLs. Hope this will help someone. Advanced search in Magento and how to use it in your own way It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been working on Magento quite actively last two months. I noticed this negative trend in my blogging; more I know about Magento, the less I write about it. Some things just look so easy now, and they start to feel like something I should not write about. Anyhow…. time to share some wisdom with community Our current client uses somewhat specific (don’t they all) store set. When I say specific, i don’t imply anything bad about it. One of the stand up features at this clients site is the advanced search functionality. One of the coolest features of the built in advanced search is the possibility to search based on attributes assigned to a product. To do the search by attributes, your attributes must have that option turned on when created (or later, when editing an attribute). In our case we had a client that wanted something like http://somestore.domain/catalogsearch/partnumber or http://somestore.domain/catalogsearch/brand instead of the default one http://somestore.domain/catalogsearch/advanced with all of the searchable fields on form. Some of you might say why not use the default and call it a day. Well, default one does not get very user friendly when large number of custom added searchable attributes are added in Magento admin interface. Then the frontend search form gets cluttered and users are easily to get confused. So in our example we would like to use the advanced search and all of it’s behaviour and logic but to use it on somewhat special link and to hide unnecessary fields. Therefore, our custom pages he would have only one input field on form and the submit button. How do we set this up? Well, all of the logic and functionality is already there. What we need is to: • use the http://somestore.domain/catalogsearch/ partnumber as a link • show only custom_partnumber field on the search form First, we have to see where does the /advanced come from. Lets open our template folder at app\design\frontend\default\default\template \catalogsearch\ there you will see the /advanced folder. Make a copy of that entire folder, in the same location, and name it to something like /custom. Now your /custom folder should have 2 files: form.phtml and result.phtml. Next in line is the /layout folder in our template. You need to open catalogsearch.xml file. Go to line 64. Do you see the <catalogsearch_advanced_index> tag there. Make the copy of it (including all of the content it hold with the closing tag also). Put the copy of that entire small chunk of code right below. Now rename all of the occurrences of “advanced” to “custom” there like on code below: <catalogsearch_custom_index> <!– Mage_Catalogsearch –> <reference name=”root”> <action method=”setTemplate”><template>page/2columns- right.phtml</template></action> </reference> <reference name=”head”> <action method=”addItem”><type>js_css</ type><name>calendar/calendar-win2k-1.css</ name><params/><!–<if/ ><condition>can_load_calendar_js</condition>–></ action> <action method=”addItem”><type>js</ type><name>calendar/calendar.js</name><!–<params/ ><if/><condition>can_load_calendar_js</condition>– ></action> <action method=”addItem”><type>js</ type><name>calendar/lang/calendar-en.js</name><!– <params/><if/><condition>can_load_calendar_js</ condition>–></action> <action method=”addItem”><type>js</ type><name>calendar/calendar-setup.js</name><!– <params/><if/><condition>can_load_calendar_js</ condition>–></action> </reference> <reference name=”content”> September 8th, 2009 Published by: inchoo Created using zinepal.com. Go online to create your own zines or read what others have already published. 5 <block type=”catalogsearch/custom_form” name=”catalogsearch_custom_form” template=”catalogsearch/custom/form.phtml”/> </reference> </catalogsearch_custom_index> Do the same for <catalogsearch_advanced_result> tag. Now go to the app\code\core\Mage\CatalogSearch\Block folder. And make a copy of /Advanced folder naming it /Custom. Open /Custom/Form.php and replace class name Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Advanced_Form with Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Custom_Form, then open /Custom/Result.php and replace class name Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Advanced_Result with Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Custom_Result. Inside Form.php there is getModel() function. DO NOT replace the Mage::getSingleton(’catalogsearch/advanced’); with Mage::getSingleton(’catalogsearch/custom’);. The point is to use the default advanced search logic here. Same goes for getSearchModel() function inside Result.php file. Next in line, controllers. We need to make the copy of AdvancedController.php and name it CustomController.php, then open it and replace the class name Mage_CatalogSearch_AdvancedController with Mage_CatalogSearch_CustomController. Inside this CustomController.php there is a function called resultAction(). You need to replace the ( … Mage::getSingleton(’catalogsearch/advanced’) … ) string ‘catalogsearch/advanced’ with ‘catalogsearch/custom’. This is the one telling the browser what page to open. Now if you open your url link in browser with /index.php/ catalogsearch/custom instead of /index.php/catalogsearch/ advanced you will see the same form there. And for the final task… As we said at the start, the point of all this is to 1) get more custom link in url and 2) display only one custom searchable attribute field in form. Therefore, for the last step we need to go to the template\catalogsearch\custom folder and open form.phtml file. Inside that file, there is one foreach loop that goes like <?php foreach ($this->getSearchableAttributes() as $_attribute): ?> All we need to do now is to place one if() condition right below it. If your custom attribute name (code) is “my_custom_attribute” then your if() condition might look something like <?php foreach ($this->getSearchableAttributes() as $_attribute): ?> <?php if($_code == ‘my_custom_attribute’): ?> … <?php endif; ?> <?php endforeach; ?> And you are done. Now you have somewhat more custom url, and only one custom field displayed on that url. This might not be the best method of reusing already written code, however I hope it’s any eye opener to somewhat more elegant aproach. Enyoj. There are 14 comments Related products There are three types of product relations in Magento: Up-sells, Related Products, and Cross-sell Products. When viewing a product, Upsells for this product are items that your customers would ideally buy instead of the product they’re viewing. They might be better quality, produce a higher profit margin, be more popular, etc. These appear on the product info page. Related products appear in the product info page as well, in the right column. Related products are meant to be purchased in addition to the item the customer is viewing. Finally, Cross-sell items appear in the shopping cart. When a customer navigates to the shopping cart (this can happen automatically after adding a product, or not), the cross-sells block displays a selection of items marked as cross-sells to the items already in the cart. They’re a bit like impulse buys – like magazines and candy at the cash registers in grocery stores. Upsells This is the example of the Up-sell. Ideally, the visitor is supposed to analyze those products as they should be relevant to the one that is just loaded. There are 2 comments File upload in Magento Now, Magento already have frontend and admin part of file upload option implemented in themes. Since backend part is still missing, understand that this still doesn’t work, however, if you’re interested how it looks, read on We are coding module of similar functionality for one of our clients as we speak, but we have our fingers crossed to see this option in next Magento version! September 8th, 2009 Published by: inchoo Created using zinepal.com. Go online to create your own zines or read what others have already published. 6 Inchoo TV – Magento channel Making use of Magento getSingleton method In one of my previous articles I showed you how to use getModel and getData methods in Magento. Although we should not put those to methods at the same level, since I’d say the getModel is a bit more higher. Higher in sense, you first use the geModel to create the instance of object then you use getData to retrieve the data from that instance. I have said it before, and I’m saying it again; Magento is a great peace of full OOP power of PHP. It’s architecture is something not yet widely seen in CMS solutions. One of the architectural goodies of Magento is it’s Singleton design pattern. In short, Singleton design pattern ensures a class has only one instance. Therefore one should provide a global point of access to that single instance of a class. So why would you want to limit yourself to only one instance? Let’s say you have an application that utilizes database connection. Why would you create multiple instance of the same database connection object? What if you had references to an object in multiple places in your application? Wouldn’t you like to avoid the overhead of creating a new instance of that object for each reference? Then there is the case where you might want to pass the object’s state from one reference to another rather than always starting from an initial state. Inside the Mage.php file of Magento system there is a getSingleton method (function if you prefer). Since it’s footprint is rather small, I’ll copy paste the code for you to see it. First, notice the word static. In PHP and in other OOP languages keyword static stands for something like “this can be called on non objects, directly from class”. Now let me show you the footprint of the getModel method. Do you notice the parameters inside the brackets? They are the same for both of theme. Where am I getting with this? Well, I already showed you how to figure out the list of all of the available parameters in one of my previous articles on my site. So all we need to do at this point is, play with those parameters using getSingleton() method and observe the results. Most important thing you need to remember is that using getSingleton you are calling already instantiated object. So if you get the empty array as a result, it means the object is empty. Only the blueprint is there, but nothing is loaded in it. We had the similar case using getModel(’catalog/product‘) on some pages. If we done var_dump or print_r we could saw the return array was empty. Then we had to use the load method to load some data into our newly instantiated object. What I’m trying to say, you need to play with it to get the feeling. Some models will return data rich objects some will return empty arrays. If we were to do Mage::getSingleton(’catalog/session) on view.phtml file we would retrieve an array with some useful data in it. Do not get confused with me mentioning the view.phmtl file, it’s just he file i like to use to test the code. Using Mage::getSingleton(’core/session) would retrieve us some more data. You get the picture. Test, test, test… What’s great about the whole thing is that naming in Magento is perfectly logical so most of the time you will probably find stuff you need in few minutes or so. Figuring out Magento object context One of the problems working under the hood of the Magento CMS is determining the context of $this. If you are about to do any advanced stuff with your template, besides layout changes, you need to get familiar with Magento’s objects (classes). Let’s have a look at the /app/design/frontend/default/ default/template/catalog/product/view.phtml file. If you open this file and execute var_dump($this) your browser will return empty page after a short period of delay. By page I mean on the product view page; the one you see when you click on Magetno product. Experienced users will open PHP error log and notice the error message caused by var_dump(). Error message: PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 121374721 bytes) I like using print_r() and var_dump(), mostly because so far I had no positive experience using fancy debug or any other debugger with systems like Magento. Why is PHP throwing errors then? If you google out the error PHP has thrown at you, you’ll see that PHP 5.2 has memory limit. Follow the link http://www.php.net/ manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.memory-limit to see how and what exactly. Google search gave me some useful results trying to solve my problems. I found Krumo at http://krumo.sourceforge.net/. It’s a PHP debugging tool, replacement for print_r() and var_dump(). After setting up Krumo and running it on Magento it gave me exactly what I wanted. It gave me the object type of the dumped file; in this case it gave me object type of $this. If you’re using an IDE studio with code completion support like NuSphere PhpED, ZendStudio or NetBeans and you decide to do something like $this-> you won’t get any methods listed. I haven’t yet seen the IDE that can perform this kind of smart logic and figure out the context of $this by it self. What you can do is use the information obtained by krumo::dump($this). Performing krumo::dump($this) on /app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/ product/view.phtml file will return object type, Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_View. Now if you do Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_View:: your IDE supporting code completion will give you a drop down of all the available methods, let’s say canEmailToFriend(); September 8th, 2009 Published by: inchoo Created using zinepal.com. Go online to create your own zines or read what others have already published. 7 Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_View::canEmailToFriend(); Now all you need to do is to replace Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_View with $this like $this->canEmailToFriend(); And you’re done. All of this may look like “why do I need this”. What you need it a smart IDE, one that can figure out the context of $this by it self and call the methods accordingly. No IDE currently does that, if I’m not missing on something. For now I see no better solution to retrieve the object context of $this across all those Magento files. If you need some help setting up Krumo with Magento you can read my other, somewhat detailed article on activecodeline.com. Hope this was useful for you. There are 2 comments Get product review info (independent) of review page Here at Inchoo, we are working on a private project, that should see daylight any time soon. One of the requirements we had is to show product review info on pages independent of product review page. Let’s say you wish to show review info on home page for some of the products. After few weeks with working with Magento, one learns how to use the model stuff directly from view files. Although this might not be the “right” way, it’s most definitely the fastest way (and I doubt most of your clients would prefer any other , especially if it’s some minor modification). Simple random banner rotator in Magento using static blocks This is my first post here and I’ll write about my first challenge regarding Magento since I came to work at Inchoo. Please note that you are not restricted only to images, you could use text, video or whatever you want here, but I’ll focus on images with links as title says. In order to show this block, you should be familiar with Magento layouts. Since that is out of scope for this article, I’ll show you how to put it below the content on cms pages. Changing default category sort order in Magento Category toolbar has many options. By default is shows how many items are in the category, you can choose how many products you wish to be displayed per page, you can change the listing type (List or Grid) and you may choose Sort Order. This “Sort Order” can be confusing. The default “Sort Order” is “Best Value”. What does it mean? How is the Best value determined? Can we change the default sort order? What is “Best Value” filed? When you go to Category page in Magento administration, you will see “Category Products” tab. From there, you will see the list of products that are associated to this category. The last column in “Position”. That is how “Best Value” is determined. So, best value is not something that is dynamically calculated. You can tailor it to your likings. How to change default Sort Order The file you need to look at is: /app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/ Block/Product/List/Toolbar.php Since we’ll modify it, make a copy to /app/code/local/Mage/Catalog/Block/Product/List/ Toolbar.php One there, you will notice this code at the beginning of the file: $this->_availableOrder = array( 'position' => $this->__('Best Value'), 'name' => $this->__('Name'), 'price' => $this->__('Price') ); Default order takes the first value available. So, all you have to do is to either: • reorder it if you want to have a selection in the Toolbar or • set only one value of choice if you will remove the selection from the toolbar I hope this will help somebody. There are 4 comments Couple of days ago we launched a new Magento project: Pebblehill Designs. This site utilizes Magento features and turns it into a very powerful online catalog. You won’t notice the Shopping Cart or checkout process yet. Even without those, this site shows exactly what Pebblehill has to offer: the most popular styles of custom upholstered furniture. You can customize the furniture collection to express your own unique style made with the highest quality materials and craftsmanship available. Pebble Hill Designs’ parsons chairs are “American made” with pride in Georgia. The quality speaks for itself. Your products are pre-assembled and ready for use when you receive them. September 8th, 2009 Published by: inchoo Created using zinepal.com. Go online to create your own zines or read what others have already published. 8 The love and the passion for beautiful home interiors translates into a high-quality product with a sophisticated style manufactured in the USA. Pebblehill Designs has assembled some of the most popular styles of custom upholstered furniture to offer to our customers. All styles are available in every fabric shown or you can provide your own fabric. You can customize the furniture collection to express your own unique style made with the highest quality materials and craftsmanship available. TeraFlex PLUS, another Magento + Wordpress duo After we launched TeraFlex Suspensions website few months ago, we created a new similar website for Teraflex PLUS. Although the name is similar, this is not the same company. The primary goal of this site is to help Jeep owners to upgrade their pets with parts and accessories for any type of adventure. The secondary goal is to create a Jeep enthusiast community in Utah, USA and surroundings. The site is powered by Wordpress and Magento combination. Magento is a superb Shopping Cart, but it lacks some of the CMS features. Wordpress is a superb CMS, but it fails to provide the needs for the eCommerce goals. The combination of these can create a very powerful website. We present you TeraFlex PLUS : Jeep Adventure Outfitters http://www.teraflexplus.com/ Magento part of the site can be viewed if you click at Shop by Vehicle or Shop by Brand tabs from the main menu, but you will notice that some blocks seamlessly integrate between two solutions. We developed this site as the Surgeworks team. The design was created by one of out top designers, Rafael Torales. We hope you enjoy it and feel free to post your comments. There are 6 comments The Best Shopping Cart :: Trend analysis of osCommerce, Magento, ZenCart and CRE Loaded | Inchoo If you try to ask this question on some forum or newsgroup, you will surely get many replies. Everyone will present you his favorite. My first developed online store was created with standard osCommerce platform. After three or four projects, I started to work with CRE Loaded and used it frequently for years. Although it was also an osCommerce fork, it had many advantages. I switched to Magento™ early this year and this is my final choice. Google™ Trends is a great tool to check some platforms popularity by comparing it to the competition. For my short analysis, I compared: As you can see, osCommerce still remains the most popular eCommerce platform. However, you can notice that this September 8th, 2009 Published by: inchoo Created using zinepal.com. Go online to create your own zines or read what others have already published. 9 popularity is fading. ZenCart is stable for the past two years. And my previous favorite, CRE Loaded (much better solution than ZenCart in my opinion), is very low. Its popularity is also fading even after their team put great effort into a new website and identity. Now, take a look at blue line. My prediction is that sometime in Q1 2009, Magento will become most popular eCommerce platform. It will surely kick osCommerce off the throne where that fat duck was sitting for many years. It was about time. First of all, let me inform you that this article is for those of you who are just starting with Magento. If you are a Magento expert, you will probably know this. Consider it just a reminder for those who use Magento for first time. There are three common mistakes that most people do when they try to use Magento for first time, so read this article and you won’t be one of them.:) • More experienced PHP developers will first read Magento Designers Guide before they try to style Magento, but others won’t and that’s the mistake number two. Since Magento has great theme fallback system there is really no need to touch default theme. Although easiest way to make new theme for new Magento is top copy the whole theme to a new folder, don’t do that. Copy only the files you will need: from / design/frontend/default/default/ directory to /design/ frontend/default/YOUR_NEW_THEME directory. Do the same thing with /skin/frontend/default/default/ Congratulations, you have your own theme just like that. All that left is to apply new theme (System- >Configuration->Design) and you are ready to do with your theme files whatever you want. • Third mistake is modifying Magento core files. What files are core ones? All what is in app/code/core folder. If you have a need to modify some of those ones, you just need to duplicate that file in the same directory path to app/ code/local. For example, if you need to modify the file app/code/core/Mage/Checkout/Block/Success.php copy it to app/code/local/Mage/Checkout/Block/Success.php and leave the core file intact. This way your Magento will be more bullet-proof to future updates. Custom CMS page layout in Magento | Inchoo Last week I had a request to add new custom layout for few cms pages in one Magento shop. It’s really useful for different static pages of your shop. First create extension with only config file in it: app/code/local/Inchoo/ AdditionalCmsPageLayouts/etc/config.xml Add your page/custom-static-page-1.phtml template file (or copy some default one for start) and you’re done There is also tutorial about this on Magento Wiki. However i don’t like approach of duplicating and overriding Mage files from /local, if it can be avoided, so i decided to write this small and useful example of adding or overriding default Magento settings through separated config files. And yes, Magento values can be overridden this way. Default layouts config can be found in app/code/core/Mage/Cms/etc/config.xml along with used xml code structure, so check it out. Thank you for listening! Drupal to Magento integration, simple link tweak with multilingual site I see my coworker and friend Željko Prša made a nice little post on Adding a new language in Magento so I figure I’ll jump with a little Drupal to Magento integration trick concerning link issues and multilingual sites. Here is a piece of code you can use in your Drupal templates to do the proper switching from Drupal site to Magento while keeping the selected language of site. Note, this tweak assumes you have the desired language setup on both Drupal and Magento side. This part goes to some of your Drupal theme file global $language ; $lname = ($language->language == null) ? 'en' : $language->language; /* like "en", "de" */ $storeView = null; if($lname == 'de') { $storeView = '?___store=german&amp;amp;amp;amp;___from_store=english'; } ??> </p><p style="text-align: left;"><a id="main_menu_shop" href="<?php echo 'http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].base_path() ?>shop/index.php/someProductLink.html< ?php echo $storeView ?>">Shop</a> Note the $storeView variable; GET ___store holds the value of code name of the view you assigned in Magento, while GET ___from_store variable is used as helper to Magento inner workings. You can basically omit the other one. Your links to Shop from Drupal to Magento should now activate the proper language, the same one you have active on Drupal side. There are 1 comments Adding a new language in Magento As anything in Magento adding a new language is something that requires a certain procedure which we will explain right now and for future reference. • 3. Now go to: Configuration -> Current Configuration Scope (Select your language from the dropdown) and on the right side under “Locale options” choose the desired language. That’s it, now when you go to the frontend of the site, you’ll notice a dropdown menu allowing the language switching. Access denied in Magento admin Some of you may encountered this problem. You install new Magento extension through downloader, try to access its configuration settings and Magento throws “Access denied” page at you. Although you’re administrator of the system. September 8th, 2009 Published by: inchoo Created using zinepal.com. Go online to create your own zines or read what others have already published. 10 So what happened here? Magento just doesn’t have stored privileges for this new extension. First just try to logout and login again. If that doesn’t work, you need to reset admin privileges. Navigate to System->Permissions->Roles and click Administrators role. Check your Role Resources settings just in case, Resource Access dropdown should be already set to All for administrators. Without changing anything just click “Save Role” button, so that Magento re-saves all permissions. You should be able to access your new extension now without problems. There are 5 comments If you worked with osCommerce, Zen Cart, CRE Loaded or any similar eCommerce platform before, you might find Magento database structure quite confusing when you see it for the first time. I advise you not to rush too much figuring out what is what by glancing through database. Try to spend first few hours getting familiar with some background. For purposes of flexibility, the Magento database heavily utilizes an Entity- Attribute-Value (EAV) data model. As is often the case, the cost of flexibility is complexity. Is there something in Magento that is simple from developers point of view? Data manipulation in Magento is often more knowledge demanding than that typical use of traditional relational tables. Therefore, an understanding of EAV principles and how they have been modeled into Magento it is HIGHLY recommended before making changes to the Magento data or the Magento schema (Wikipedia: Entity-attribute- value_model). Varien has simplified the identification of EAV related tables with consistent naming conventions. Core EAV tables are prefixed with “EAV_”. Diagrams in this post contain a section labeled “EAV” which displays Magento’s core EAV tables and thier relationships to non-EAV tables. Database diagrams and documents found in this post are intended to mirror the database schema as defined by Varien. Table relationships depicted in the diagrams represent only those relationships explicitly defined as Foreign Keys in the Magento database. Additional informal/undiagrammed table relationships may also exist, so when modifying the schema or directly manipulating data it is important to identify and evaluate possible changes to these tables as well (and the tables they relate to, and the tables they relate to…). The author of Database Diagram is Gordon Goodwin, IT Consultant. You can see his info in the PDF. There are 12 comments Magento + .Net Framework, simple order preview app For those of you who are into kinky stuff I made a simple, more of a proof of concept, application that sits in Widnows taskbar and shows the order info in balloon popup. Took me little more than half of hour to get this working. Almost forgot how great C# is [...]... Cheers ^_^ There are 5 comments Free Magento Themes vs Custom Magento Design This blog post describes pros and cons of having a free Magento theme versus having a custom Magento design from a marketing perspective Free Magento Themes: There are some pretty obvious advantages of using a free Magento theme: • It works – Most of the free Magento themes work just fine with Magento out of the box However, truth... it will be usable for all of you Magento developers who are trying to find a solution for your specific needs Snippi is a Magento related website for sharing Magento code snippets You can see it live on http://snippi.net Finding a solution for specific need can be a nightmare in Magento since you are faced with the process of heavy digging through Magento forum and Magento related blogs Very soon you... widgets in Magento Download Inchoo_CoffeeFreak extension for Magento Hope you find it useful Offline Magento problems I was working recently on a local server without internet connection (nothing can stop us !! ) and i noticed that Magento administration is extremely slow Some parts of administration took up to 10 seconds to load On every page view in admin Magento was trying to resolve widgets.magentocommerce.com... some users of French Magento forums found similar problem in downloader (Magento connect manager) I can confirm this couse i tested it myself The most funny part was that Magento cached my get request so i couldn’t get rid of my test alert box There are 7 comments Form Validation in Magento | Inchoo One of the coolest things in Magento is a form validation, and the way how it’s done Magento uses Prototype... comments New Magento theme tutorial | Inchoo There are many new Magento stores that are published each day If you are with Magento for a longer time, you will also notice that many of those look similar to default or modern Magento theme Creating an totally unique and custom one can be a difficult process, easpecially taking into consideration number of different interfaces we have This is why many Magento. .. document There are 4 comments Affiliates for all – Magento integration Recently one of our clients needed and info on Affiliate module for Magento When it comes to Magento, word “module” is loosely related Sure, every module needs config files in order to report it’s “connection” to Magento core Modules like this, Blank Theme is a sample skeleton theme for Magento designer and a perfect way to start a new... styling This makes it excellent base ground for a new Magento project It doesn’t come with default installation, so you will have to use Magento Connect to get it http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/518/blanktheme Created using zinepal.com Go online to create your own zines or read what others have already published 13 September 8th, 2009 Magento community member Ross gave a good review comment:... documentation for easy print This is probably the best starting tutorial for creating a fresh new Magento template I plan to write a short related tutorials in the days of 1st Magento development project, so I invite you to subscribe to RSS if you wish to be posted Custom admin theme in Magento As mentioned on Magento forums the easiest way to achieve this is with overriding adminhtml config with your local... links in the magento blocks as well as the whishlist itself Published by: inchoo There are 4 comments Magento Installation with SVN or Wget Unix command | Inchoo Those of you who know what SVN is, feel free to skip this article Those of you who are not familiar with SVN, this is a must-read If you use standard FTP to upload all Magento files, you may find this process very time consuming Magento 1.1.8... This alternative is very well explained on Magento website in Wiki section: http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/groups/227/ installing _magento_ via_shell_ssh Both scenarios will only place files You still need to run web based installer afterward But, that is another story There are 6 comments Custom Transactional Emails There are 3 comments Bestseller products in Magento Bestseller or best selling product