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Free CMS/Block Module for Magento – v2.0

admin — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:18:45 +0000

Overview

(Version 2.0 Released)

Free CMS/Block is a powerful magento extension that provide dynamic block solution. Free CMS allow to put any HTML content to any position on Magento site. You can put text, banner, advertisement, images, flash, music, video, product…

Features

1. Easy to use with admin backend management
2. Allow to display block anywhere with 10 predefined position
3. Allow to specify a store view/website/store
4. Allow to enable/disable any block
5. Allow to specify category to display
6. Allow to specify product to display
7. Suppor full HTML content (Text, Banner, Advertisement, Images, Flash, Music, Video, Product…)
8. Don’t create new database, just extends default magento block
9. Easy to install, easy to upgrade, just copy to use

How is it strong in advertisment and promotion?

1. You can use any advertisment and promotion type: Text, Image, Flash, Video or any HTML content
2. You can place it any where on your site. There a 10 good positions for you
3. You can specify a store view, a category or group of category, a product or group of product.
For instance:
- If you specify a block to show on category “mobile” then the block will only show on “Mobile” or “Mobile Phone” category and its products.
- If you specify a block to show on product “Nokia” then the block will show on all Nokia products like “Nokia N92“, “Nokia 8800“,…
You can combine store view, category and product filter to create flexible and meaningful advertisments and promotions.

Support 10 pre-defined positions

1. Menu Top
2. Menu Bottom
3. Content Top
4. Cart Content Top
5. Customer Content Top
6. Sidebar Right Top
7. Sidebar Right Bottom
8. Sidebar Left Top
9. Sidebar Left Bottom
10. Page Bottom

All CMS block can be manged in admin backend eassily.

Installation is very simple, just copy and run.

Live Demo

Front-end: http://demo.hello-magento.com/freecms/electronics/cell-phones.html

Back-end: http://demo.hello-magento.com/index.php/admin/freecms/cms_block

Admin Access: admindemo/admindemo

Buy this via Hello Magento™

Photo Album + Lightbox with Backend Management

admin — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:54:36 +0000

Overview

This extension allow to create photo album for magento store.

On front end, the user can view albums, select to view album details.

User also can view album with description, view photo thumbnail and see full photo with lightbox.

On backend, admin can add/remove album, add/remove photo for each album. Admin also can add album description that support full HTML tag.

Installation is very easy, just copy & ready to run.

Live Demo

Front-end: http://demo.mage-world.com/1301/default/gallery/

At this time, the features of this extension is very basic. Every enhanced features could be implement.

Buy this extension now

Please click here to request a customize

Magento MP3 Flash Player with Backend Management

admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 21:47:39 +0000

Overview

This extension allow to create music album for a product as CD.

On front end, the buyers can listen trial song via the MP3 flash player. The player display an album as a play list, play songs repeatedly and automatically when the buyers view product detail. It also allow the buyers to select stop/play, next/back track, select a specific songs on play list.

On back end, the admin can add/remove songs of product album. This extension support single or double albums for CD products.

Installation is very easy. Just create an custom attribute for CD product and copy all needed files to Magento folder.

Live Demo

Front-end: http://asia-connect.com.vn/demo/magento/default/cd-albums/sample-cd-album.html

Back-end: http://asia-connect.com.vn/demo/magento/admin

Admin Access: admindemo/admindemo

At this time, the features of this extension is very basic. Every enhanced features could be implement.

Buy this extension now

Please click here to request a customization

Magento Live Demo

Magento Featured Products

admin — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 17:15:16 +0000

I’ve been working with Magento version 0.8.16100 for a couple days now trying to implement a Featured Product feature. The Featured Product is a product with an attribute I added from the admin. When the administrator selects “Yes” in the “Featured” attribute, that product will be displayed in a content block.

I’ll explain each step I took to make this custom feature. Please forgive me if I left anything out. The PHP itself I would like to rewrite to be more… professional, but I couldn’t figure out how to query a product by its attribute. Maybe you can help?

Step 1) Create new “Featured” attribute

Create a new attribute by going to Catalog -> Attributes -> Manage Attributes -> Add New Attribute.

Attribute Properties
Attribute Identifier: featured
Catalog Input Type for Store Owner: Yes/No
Unique Value (not shared with other products): No
Values Required: No
Input Validation for Store Owner: None
Apply To Configurable/Grouped Product: Yes

Front End Properties
Use in quick search: No
Use in advanced search: Yes
Comparable on Front-end: No
Use In Layered Navigation (Can be used only with catalog input type ‘Dropdown’): No

System Properties
Data Type for Saving in Database: String
Globally Editable: No
Visible on Catalog Pages on Front-end: Yes

Manage Label/Options
Default: Featured Product
English: Featured Product

Save the new attribute and go to Catalog -> Attributes -> Manage Attributes Sets to add the attribute to the default feature set.

Step 2) Add Block configuration to catalog.xml

Open MyCompany/app/design/frontend/default/default/layout/catalog.xml. We want to add a new right above the product list block in the default category layout.
Insert the block configuration on line 73 (default catalog.xml).

 <block type="catalog/product_featured" name="product_featured" as="product_featured" template="catalog/product/featured.phtml">block> 

Step 3) Create new block class that will instantiate the featured product

Create a new file, and directories: app/code/local/MyCompany/Catalog/Block/Product/Featured.php

 class MyCompany_Catalog_Block_Product_Featured extends Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_Abstract

{

public function getFeaturedProduct()

{

// instantiate database connection object

$storeId = 0;

$categoryId = $this->getRequest()->getParam('id', false);

$resource = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource');

$read = $resource->getConnection('catalog_read');

$productStoreTable = $resource->getTableName('catalog/product_store');

$categoryProductTable = $resource->getTableName('catalog/category_product');
// Query database for all products in this category because I don't know how to query by attribute

// this logic bothers me because I'm selecting and instantiating each product in the whole category

// just to get the first featured product.  The query should include the 'featured' attribute in the WHERE

// clause.  If you know how to do that, please share :)

$select = $read->select()

->from(array('cp'=>$categoryProductTable))

->join(array('ps'=>$productStoreTable), 'ps.product_id=cp.product_id', array())

->where('ps.store_id=?', $storeId)

->where('cp.category_id=?', $categoryId);

$featuredProductData = $read->fetchAll($select);
// iterate over result set from database

foreach ($featuredProductData as $row) {
// instantiate the product object

$product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($row['product_id']);
// if the product is a featured product, return the object

if ($product->getData('featured')) {

return $product;

}

}

return; } }

We’re almost there!

Step 4) Extend Mage_Catalog_Block_Category_View

Create a new file, and directories, called app/code/local/MyCompany/Catalog/Block/Category/View.php. We’re extending the core class here so our module will be separate from the core code base. When upgrading, we won’t have to worry about our code not working or having to patch files.

 class MyCompany_Catalog_Block_Category_View extends Mage_Catalog_Block_Category_View

{

public function getFeaturedProductHtml()

{

return $this->getBlockHtml('product_featured');

}

}

Step 5) Modify the templates

I haven’t really integrated any real HTML changes, so I will simply point out the files to create and where to edit the HTML.

Edit app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/category/view.phtml and add the following code:

=$this->getFeaturedProductHtml()?>

right above this line:

=$this->getProductListHtml()?>

Edit app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/product/featured.phtml and customize your HTML here (see any of the product templates for Product object member variables).

Step 6) Add new blocks to the app/etc/local.xml

Add

 <blocks>

<catalog>

<rewrite>

<product_featured>MyCompany_Catalog_Block_Product_Featuredproduct_featured>

rewrite>

<rewrite>

<category_view>MyCompany_Catalog_Block_Category_Viewcategory_view>

rewrite>

catalog>

blocks>

I hope this helps you add a “Featured Product” feature. It certainly feels thorough, but if I left anything out, please let me know and I’ll be happy to help. If you know how to query by a specific product attribute, please let me know.

Outsourcing to Vietnam

admin — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 17:06:25 +0000

This article by Andrew Bibby, in a slightly different form, was first published in the Financial Times, 2003

Trieu Nguyen used to teach architecture to university students in Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon), Vietnam. These days his workplace is a modern office block near the city’s airport and his days are typically spent checking technical drawings for, say, a new secondary school in the Home Counties or a student accommodation block in south London.

Trieu Nguyen is Technical and Compliance Manager with Atlas Industries, a young company which is intent on persuading the architectural profession in Britain of the benefits of outsourcing work half way round the world. The fifty or so architectural staff working for Atlas at its Vietnam head office work almost entirely for the UK market, producing drawings and 3D computer-generations of buildings under design. These are then transferred to and from British architects electronically, either by email or via a password protected website.

Offshore outsourcing, already a feature of many other industries, is the way forward for architecture as well, at least according to Atlas’s CEO Joe Woolf. His firm focuses particularly on the middle stage in building contracts, after the initial design work and before major work begins on site, when large numbers of technical drawings are required. Mr Woolf says that this is the stage where cost overruns are a significant risk and where architects’ skills are not particularly profitably employed. “Drawing is not a core competence for architects,” he argues.

Why choose Vietnam? Mr Woolf, an expatriate Briton who worked as a manager in the oil industry in Vietnam for over ten years, says that the country is politically and economically stable and, although poor, has invested heavily in educating its population. Almost all Atlas’s Vietnamese staff are graduates, mostly with architectural backgrounds. Typical pay at Atlas, according to Mr Woolf, is about $6000 net a year, high by local standards (Vietnam’s GDP is about $400 per head), although a fraction of comparable UK salary levels.

Atlas claims that architectural practices can save between a third and a half of the costs normally incurred in the drawings production phase of a contract, which in turn can increase significantly the overall profitability of a contract. Interestingly, however, cost is not necessarily the only motivation for going offshore. Lloyd Stratton, chairman of the 60-strong Architects Co-Partnership practice, prefers to stress the opportunity which outsourcing brings to cope with surges in work load without the need for new permanent staff. “To be honest, I don’t see it as being less expensive. The great advantage is the ability to switch resources on when they are needed, and then to switch them off again,” he says. His firm first tried out Atlas two years ago for work on a new hangar at Luton Airport and has since used Atlas among other things to produce a walk-through animation video for a new school it is designing. As Mr Stratton points out, this work, had it been done in Britain, would have tied up highly-qualified staff.

Atlas was set up in Vietnam simply because that was where Joe Woolf , whose background is in civil and structural engineering, found himself living. He says that the idea for Atlas came to him after he had begun lecturing at the university and had been impressed by the students’ skills and enthusiasm. The embryonic business raised an initial $1m in private equity investment and took on its first employee in 1999. Its annual turnover is now about £2m.

Mr Woolf is honest, however, about the problems which quickly emerged in the original business plan. “We grossly underestimated the flash-to-bang time, in other words the time it takes decision-makers to get both their heads and their hearts around the outsourcing concept,” he says. Like other start-ups, the company took time to identify its core business. Mr Woolf says they were distracted into chasing contracts in a wide variety of sectors and in several parts of the world. The firm also initially offered a software development and website production service, a business from which it has now withdrawn. What Mr Woolf now describes as ‘obvious business school lessons’ were learned the hard way, and in the process a further $1m of investment capital was required.

Mr Woolf now feels confident that, in focusing on the British architecture and structural engineering sector, his company has found its niche. Atlas currently has sixteen UK architecture practices as clients, including both very small and large businesses, and it hopes this year to make an operating profit for the first time.

Its future growth depends, however, on persuading many more architects to look offshore. There are perhaps two obstacles to overcome. The first is the need to encourage a rather conservative profession to change its ways of working methods. Mr Woolf says that firms need to change their work culture to benefit fully from outsourcing.

There is another trickier, and more political, issue. Whilst Mr Woolf claims that no British jobs have been lost to Vietnam because of Atlas – he points in justification to the current shortage of skilled architectural professionals in Britain – some architects are concerned about the risk of bad publicity, particularly where PFI-funded building contracts are involved. As one architect put it, “PFI rightly or wrongly gets a lot of bad press. The idea that PFI work might be done in the Far East makes us get very nervous.”

After installing magento can’t log in to admin panel

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 08:46:27 +0000

Problem Description
While installing magento on xampp version 2.5 you have provided admin username and password. After installation finished you no longer login with your admin account. In fact in the “Log in to Admin Panel” window whenever you provide wrong password/username combination it displays “Invalid Username or Password.” But whenever you provide correct password it does not show anything. Though a new url like
http://127.0.0.1/magento/index.php/admin/index/index/key/d135be4de664ab83db829120740e058a/
is displayed on the address bar.
Everytime you do this you can’t log in to admin panel.

Cause of the problem
The problem occurs because magneto could not store cookies. We run it as localhost and localhost is not true domain but to store cookies we need a domain. That’s why login stops without saying any word.

Solution of the problem
Way 1:
In different forums I saw they mentioned connecting as http://localhost/magento/index.php/admin will fail but if you connect as http://127.0.0.1/magento/index.php/admin it will work. But in my case IP address in the URL did not work too.
I made it work into whenever I changed my browser. Suppose I installed magento using google chrome browser and I open admin url into my firefox window and it worked. Though in the firefox the url http://localhost/magento/index.php/admin did not work, but url http://127.0.0.1/magento/index.php/admin worked fine.

Way 2:
-Go to app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Session/Abstract/Varien.php file within your magento directory.

-Find the code,

session_set_cookie_params(
           $this->getCookie()->getLifetime(),
           $this->getCookie()->getPath(),
           $this->getCookie()->getDomain(),
           $this->getCookie()->isSecure(),
           $this->getCookie()->getHttponly()
       );

-Replace above code by,

session_set_cookie_params(
           $this->getCookie()->getLifetime(),
           $this->getCookie()->getPath()
           //$this->getCookie()->getDomain(),
           //$this->getCookie()->isSecure(),
           //$this->getCookie()->getHttponly()
       );

-Save it and try to login to your magento admin panel.
It would work.

How To Setup Multiple Magento Stores

admin — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:31:52 +0000

There are numerous ways to setup multiple Magento stores that all share the same codebase and backend, but what method you use depends on your needs.

This article is written with cPanel in mind, though the methodologies listed below apply no matter what control panel you’re using.

Jump To Section

URL Structure

The actual URL structure of your stores is a matter of personal preference. You can, for example, have two entirely different stores running on the same domain that share the same instance of Magento:

mall.com/shoes
mall.com/shirts

These stores could also be setup on their own domain and still share the same instance of Magento:

shoes.com
shirts.com

Another example would be a mall type setup, where your primary domain is the portal to access various stores:

mall.com
shoes.mall.com
shirts.mall.com

Regardless of the URL structure, the method for setting this up will pretty much be the same, and the result is what we’re really after, which is to have one codebase for all of your stores, and one backend to manage all of these stores from.

Shared Hosting Caveat

If you want each store to have it’s own SSL certificate and don’t want to share a single checkout, e.g. you don’t want visitors leaving domainA.com to checkout on domainB.com, then you will not be able to do this in a shared hosting environment.

The reason why you cannot do this is simple. In order for a website to have an SSL certificate, it requires a dedicated IP address.

There’s no way to allow an addon or parked domain in cPanel to have its own IP address. Instead, it shares the IP address of the primary domain.

You probably think you could sign up for two shared hosting accounts, so each one has its own dedicated IP address, but that won’t work either.

Since it’s shared hosting, there are security measures in place to prevent one user from reading the files of another user.

So for shared hosting clients, you’re limited to the following scenarios:

All of your stores do not have a secure checkout, which is fine if you’re using PayPal, Google Checkout, or a similar third-party service that handles the processing of card data on their website. For example, visitors to any of your stores are redirected to a third-party website for card processing.
All of your stores share a secure checkout point. For example, you own three domains: mall.com, shoes.com, and shirts.com You use mall.com as your primary domain and have an SSL certificate associated with it. The other two domains would be either addon or parked domains, and visitors to those sites would be redirected to mall.com to checkout.
All of your stores are setup as subdomains, and you’ve purchased a wildcard SSL certificate, which is roughly $1000/year and is for legally registered businesses.

If you do need an SSL certificate for all of your domains, you will need to be in a dedicated hosting environment, such as our Dedicated Container, which comes with 5 IP addresses. In this type of environment, all five domains will be able to access the same set of files.