Development

Aug 30, 2011

The standard Magento contact form is built into the Magento framework and doesn’t allow for admins to manage the content, this article describes your options for managing content on the contact page as well as maintaining multiple contact forms and customising their fields. The normal contact form is a core piece of functionality within Magento and there are several options for customizing it. Adding a static block to the contact form The simplest requirement to fulfil is being able to add content above or below the form containing an introduction, title and alternative contact options such as address and email information.

Aug 15, 2011

Building websites that can be quickly and easily updated is vitally important but with so many content management systems available how do you make the decision as to which one to use. I am really concentrating on what I would categories as “lite” content solutions. Sites that take the pain out of managing your design and content but aren’t going to give you absolutely everything you might ever need in the process.

Aug 4, 2011

Magento brilliantly provides a configuration option for each of the built-in payment methods to allow you to set the orders status – unfortunately by default the only option you can pick is pending. Each of Magento’s payment methods are created by the core payment module or as their own modules such as paypal – you can find the core methods in the folder app/code/core/Mage/Payment. If you take a look in the system.xml configuration file – inside the etc folder then you will find some way down the field definition for the new order status field that you see in the admin.

Jun 9, 2011

I have been working with Ruby and independently with Ruby on Rails for a few years now and although I am really familiar with Gems I have managed to avoid ever creating one myself – recently I had to convert an existing project to a gem and I realise how foolish I was not to “gemify” it from day one. I’m going to talk through the process I went through to help anyone in a similar situation out, but mostly to persuade you to create things as Gems from the start of the project.

May 6, 2011

Most WordPress templates don’t seem to support displaying the descriptions for categories, tags and the author bio’s. Here is a quick explanation of how you add that information into your WordPress admin and then how to change your templates to display it. The main reason for wanting to do this is simply to provide a little extra supplementary information on lots of your blogs pages – but it may also have some benefit for SEO as well.

May 5, 2011

This was a simple site based on a HTML home page, with a javascript calculator and a wordpress blog simply attached with the same design. The application form is a third-party component and so I simply built the design in HTML, CSS and Javascript and implemented in WordPress.

Apr 28, 2011

I am pretty sure I missed the boat with this one but I feel like I should do my bit to contribute to the worthy cause of getting some decent Javascript documentation at the top of relevant google searches. The basic problem seems to be that some of the sites out there occupying the top spots have been there for so long and have built up such a reputation for google that they aren’t going anywhere soon.

Apr 21, 2011

This is mainly just a quick reference for myself because I keep getting this error and have to search the internet for the solution. Basic problem is that on Ubuntu gems that use the nokogiri library for XML parsing require libxml2 which isn’t usually installed. When you try to install certain gems such as nokogiri or mechanize, either through gems directly or through bundler, get a message about missing dependencies – and when you wade a little deeper that libxml2 is missing.

Apr 14, 2011

I usually try and stick to the standard Magento templates where possible. The 3 column, 2 column left and right and single column layouts are nicely put together and it gives enough flexibility for most sites. I have recently been dealing with sites with landing pages that follow a single design layout but that are a bit too complicated to build from scratch each time using the single column template. So, I wondered how simple would it be to create my own template file that I can use for CMS pages, with dedicated blocks for different areas of the page.