Imagine a scenario where you wish to simply create a view file like custom-note.phtml and show this view file on some new url inside the Magento store. One way to do this is to create a CMS page and call that block from within CMS page. But what if you wish to create and append this block to other areas of Magento layout that are inaccessible from CMS page interface form admin? What if I want to add new div element under the breadcrumbs and append new block under it?
magento …

Ever wanted to “just send the email” using the built in email features in Magento? Ever hit the wall trying to do something with Magento? OK, I know the answer to the other one, just had to ask . Anyhow, sending the emails with Magento turned out to be a process of “just” a few hours of tracing Magento code.
I cant wait for smart comments like, “few hours, huh its so easy…”. Yea, thats the beauty of Magento… few hours of bashing your head against the wall while you …

Due to the “complexity” of Magento’s xml files, developers can waste great amount of time on “unnecessary” things.
When I say “complexity” I say it with purpose. XML files are not so complex by them selves, but due to extreme lack of documentation and changes Magento pumps in every new “major” release, people are lost among things that should really be sideways. Anyway, in this little article I will show you how to create basic, startup structure for your module to get it shown under Magento Admin main top menu.
As you …

As many things in Magento, removing product comparison is not available thru the admin interface. Thus, leaving us with the only option of getting down and dirty with theme files editing.

This guide is pretty straightforward and is based on the Magento ver. 1.3.1.1
Before beginning of this procedure please Go to: System-> Cache Management and disable cache. You can turn it on after you’re done.
Step 1 – reports.xml
Open: app/design/frontend/deafult/Your Theme name/layout/reports.xml and delete the following lines:

<block type="reports/product_compared" before="right.permanent.callout" name="right.reports.product.compared" template="reports/product_compared.phtml" />

<pre><block type="reports/product_viewed" before="right.permanent.callout" name="right.reports.product.viewed" template="reports/product_viewed.phtml" /></pre>

Step 2 – catalog.xml
Open app/design/frontend/deafult/Your …

Adding a new tab under onepage checkout in Magento might seem as incredibly easy task. right?! Well, it’s not. If you want to do it properly, you gonna have to do some work. Took me few hours to get this one running. Attached are screenshots for you to see final result.

Here is the module itself Inchoo_Heared4us.
Few words about module. It uses built in Admin theme module from a coworker Ivan Weiler. If you have this Admin theme module installer already please disable it, since its built into this Heared4us module. …

There are few different ways one can achieve this kind of functionality. Normally in Magento you would do it like a real, “independent”, module (extension) thus loosing at least two ours to make a few lines of code work.
The simplest way to add this kind of feature to your product view page is to open the view.phtml file under the app/design/frontend/default/custom/template/catalog/product/ folder.
And add the following code where you sish to show your “Tweet this” link:

<a title="Send this page to Twitter!" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Check out the <?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_product->getName()) ?> at < ?php …

Magento has several issues with duplicated content. Of course, you don’t actually have two versions of the same content in your database, however, in the eyes of search engines, two different URLs serving same content are counted as duplicated content and will cause you lots of problems. The most obvious problem is that your page rank is leaking on different versions of virtually the same landing page. You also might end up with having several versions of the same content indexed which is bad in so many ways.
First duplicated content …

I have been involved in Magento development for almost a year now. God knows I had (and still have) my moments of pain with it . If you are in professional, everyday, PHP development that focuses mainly on Magento then your life probably isn’t all flowers and bees. Magento is extremely rich eCommerce platform, but its main downside IMHO is its size and code complexity. If you download Magento via SVN, you will sound find out it has around 11 600 and more files. This is no small figure. …

This is my first post here and I’ll write about my first challenge regarding Magento since I came to work at Inchoo.
As title says I’ll show you how to implement simple random banner rotation functionality in Magento using static blocks.
First of all, upload images you want to use in “/skin/frontend/YOUR_INTERFACE/YOUR_THEME/images/”
In admin panel add N static blocks (”CMS->Static Blocks->Add new block”)
For identifier field use something like this:

SomeBannerIdentifierName_1
SomeBannerIdentifierName_2
SomeBannerIdentifierName_3
…
SomeBannerIdentifierName_N

For each content use this:

<a href="ADDRESS_YOU_WANT_TO_USE"><img src="{{skin url=images/media/IMAGE_YOU_WANT_TO_USE.jpg}}" alt="Some alt text"  /></a>

Please note that you are not restricted only to images, you could use text, video …

Unlike good old WordPress that “every kid in the block” knows how to create a plugin for, Magento is a whole new system. It requires extensive knowledge of OOP, ORM’s, MVC, and few other stuff. This is why not “every kid in the block” can write a module for Magento, and this is why I love it. However, unlike WordPress, Drupal and other community driven systems out there who keep in mind backward compatibility things with Magento things are a bit different.
One of the things that caught my eye and …