This blog post describes pros and cons of having a free Magento theme versus having a custom Magento design from a marketing perspective.
Free Magento Themes:
There are some pretty obvious advantages of using a free Magento theme:

It’s free. – This one is a no-brainer, you don’t need to invest any money in it.
It’s fast. – You don’t need to wait for it to be finished, you just download it and use it.
It works. – Most of the free Magento themes work just fine with Magento out of the box.

However, truth be …

Latest version of Magento, as of time of this writing, is 1.3.2.3. Latest, as well as previous versions come with “half-packed” support for TinyMCE editor. There are however few bugs and few steps that need to be handled in order to enable wysiwyg editing in CMS pages. Personally I am not that big of a fan of wysiwyg editors, mostly because I am developer and like to know what I write down.
However, most of the store owners are not developers or even not that much technically savvy people (not that …

Simple : ) -Ok, lets get down to business. This one is really, really simple, but powerful. In all it greatness Magento lacks the good content management solution (CMS features). Lot of people are heading down the road of integrating the WordPress and Magento. Probably everyone in web development has heard about WordPress. Personaly I like them, from Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress… But there is that little something that makes WordPress far more loving in the eyes of the client. Not to start a flame here, lets get back to the …

Many people wonder why sometimes the SID part appears in their Magento URLs. This is when your URL has additional SID query usually at the end. Take a look at the image. The curiosity is that it does not appear always. What is the most common scenario it happens? You didn’t access the site with the same domain variant you entered as your “Base URL” in your System> Configuration> Web interface.
When you decide to launch the site, you have to decide whether you will market http://www.domain.com/ URL or http://domain.com/. This …

Some merchants use NaviGate payment gateway from MerchatPlus because of the lesser costs than its big brother Authorize.net. Interesting this about this payment gateway is its compatibility with Authorize.net. So, if you need to enable it in Magento, you will not have to find someone who will have to write the module from scratch. You just need to use standard Authorize.net module, but with some modifications.
So, to use Navigate, you have to enable Authorize.net module. NaviGate is compatible with Authorize.net’s AIM Integration method. This means that any shopping cart or …

Every Magento user noticed that there is special {{magentocode}} syntax available in cms pages and blocks. We traced a bit to find out which params are available and what exactly they do.

As strange as this may sound, processor class that gets called is Mage_Core_Model_Email_Template_Filter located at app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Email/Template/Filter.php .
There are also some interesting directives in superclass Varien_Filter_Template, but if i’m not mistaken, none of them can be used.
There are six replacement codes  that can be used and each triggers its equivalent Directive function:
skinDirective
mediaDirective
htmlescapeDirective
storeDirective
blockDirective
layoutDirective
I’ll start with easier and most commonly used …

Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors. Let’s see how it behaves in Magento.

1. Download FLIR from FLIR homepage. I was using latest 1.2 stable for this article because of simplicity, but if you try you’ll find out that 2.0 beta also works great but requires little more configuration.
2. Unpack FLIR content (cache,fonts,etc.) inside skin/frontend/default/default/facelift
I think it makes perfect sense to put …