Blog

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.

Apr 13, 2011

I came across this minor problem when a client running a Magento website wanted to enable the paypal checkout. Once I enabled paypal express checkout and started to run through some test orders the custom module I had written to export their orders ready for their warehouse/dispatch system had a few problems. The problem is that PayPal doesn’t use the same naming for its addresses as Magento. In Magento the customer is asked for billing and delivery addresses and where they opt to use the same address the details are simply repeated.

Apr 8, 2011

I have been writing a magento based site for a client and they have a few requirements for their despatch system that I had not seen before. One of them is to set a flag in their dispatch system indicating the payment method chosen by the customer (seems sensible, I just haven’t had to do it before). Anyway, turns out as it often is with Magento, that this is a really simple thing to do, once you find the information.

Apr 7, 2011

This post is another quick explanation on something that is is much more difficult to figure out than it should be. One of the most basic things you would ever want to do in programming is check if one string of text contains another string of text. In every other programming language I can think of this is simple but for some reason the PHP way of doing this has added complexity.

Mar 31, 2011

First of all let me explain that joining a table to itself normally – i.e. using primary and foreign keys, is pretty simple and can be done using the lovely ActiveRecord belongs_to and has_many association. That isn’t what I am talking about here, I am interested in joining to the same table using other fields and conditions. Why would you want to do this? Well in my case it is the first step in shortlisting customers in the database who have potential duplicates.

Mar 31, 2011

No matter how many Magento websites I build I never seem to be able to remember the following code snippet to add products onto the homepage or CMS page. I thought I would post, simply so I know where I can quickly find the information – I hope others find it useful as well. The simplest way to do this is to add a widget to the cms page which allows you to specify a category if you need to as well as the template.

Mar 25, 2011

I recently had to build a module for Magento that let you switch between each of the Magento Websites in the admin. I’ve written a short explanation of how I did this below, along with the code. Create a module First off, you need a name for your company/organisation and a name for your module. Once you decide that you need to create the folders. You will probably want to put your module on the local scope – this is where I do everything, although if you are developing a plugin then people sometimes use the community scope.

Mar 24, 2011

Most marketers who profit from an email send, an e-commerce site, or a lead generation landing page stop there. Why mess with success, as the saying goes. But how much money are you leaving on the table by settling for what worked yesterday? Through our research with consumer and B2B marketers the world over, we have (marketing experiments that is!) learned that companies are letting billions of dollars leak out of their sales and marketing funnel.

Mar 23, 2011

Earth Hour in 2011 is fast approaching, so I hope everyone in Guernsey will do their best to participate in the event at 8.30pm Saturday, 26th March by switching off your lights and doing something that doesn’t harm the environment too much for a whole hour. Seems this Earth Hour thing has been going on since 2007 and started in Australia. It has quickly grown into a global event with support from politicians and celebrities alike.

Mar 22, 2011

The long awaited Firefox 4 will hopefully be released today, with plenty of [new features][1] and support for HTML 5, CSS 3. I’m really hoping they haven’t rushed out the release to match the recent IE9 release, but the release candidate has been around for a while so lets hope that isn’t the case. I’ve been finding Firefox extremely slow for the last few months so I am glad to see they are bigging-up the performance improvements in this latest version.