Magento Development

Apr 12, 2012

It turns out that once you understand Magento’s complicated template/layout structure it becomes pretty easy to add content blocks wherever your website needs them. This is just a quick explanation of how that works. So first things first, find your page layout file. This will be under the app/design folder in your themes layout folder and will be named page.xml. This file contins an element called default that (in magento terms) is called a Hook.

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 18, 2011

The standard Facebook like button uses HTTP as the protocol for loading the Facebook JavaScript. This means you may receive SSL warnings to do with insecure items being on the page when viewing the SSL parts of your Magento site such as the checkout and the user account pages. To solve this problem you simply need to include the Facebook script using HTTPS – since Facebook also support the SSL version.

Aug 17, 2011

Guernsey and Jersey in the Channel Islands have independent tax rules from the UK and require some special processing in a Magento eCommerce website – here is how to go about it. First of all lets look at the sales tax rules in these three jurisdictions. UK sales tax or VAT (value added tax) is currently charged at 20% and needs to be applied to all orders payed for/delivered to the UK.

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.

Jul 19, 2011

As with most things in Magento the configuration of tax is extremely thorough and flexible – but you do have to think a little bit to set it all up, here is a quick guide to doing just that. Configuration First take a look at the System->Configuration options for VAT under the sales section. Here we have loads of options for how the tax should be applied to order and defaults to use before we actually know where the customer is ordering from or delivering to.

Jun 19, 2011

The Magento Designer’s Guide has the following short intro about layout XML and I think it explains it quite well, although I will go through some more detail with examples afterwards. Layout is a virtual component of the Magento application. By modifying the components of layout, you can build your store page in an upgrade-compatible way. Layout is comprised of default layout and layout updates that are made up of easy-to-learn XML tags.

Jun 14, 2011

This new site follows a design I was provided and is built using Magento and a number of specialist plugins. The core Magento functionality for different websites and stores was used to create versions of the site in multiple languages and with slightly different product ranges and pricing. All of this was done with the minimum of repetition within the admin portion of the site. I used an Advanced Currency plugin by Retail Evolved to allow for prices to be set in one currency but billed in another – allowing the site owners to keep a single currency merchant account.

Jun 10, 2011

This Magento site had a really fast turn-around and I think everyone has been really pleased by the results. We are aiming for a high-end market and trying to make the most of the Jewellery. From a technical point of view the site uses Magento under the hood, but the product lists have been heavily customised to show large product images and use some flashy javascript to scroll through the product photos.