Recently we were working on speeding up parts of client site which had usual problem of slow page loading caused by complicated configurable products. To solve the problem we were experimenting with extending core Magento caching capabilities.
Magento has built in predifined system of block output caching. Its block abstract has Zend_Cache caching capabilities that can be modified for your own needs. I’m showing here an example of caching whole product view block, however this is just a specific example of how things works, problems are different and requires different approach …

Adding an Adwords tracking code to order confirmation page in Magento is relatively easy task. One that can be handled under an hour or so if you choose to implement it the proper way. Here is how.
Modify the “app/design/frontend/default/my_custom_theme/layout/checkout.xml” file. Look for section

<checkout_onepage_success>
<reference name="root">
<action method="setTemplate"><template>page/2columns-right.phtml</template></action>
</reference>
<reference name="content">
<block name="checkout.success" template="checkout/success.phtml" type="checkout/onepage_success" />
</reference>
</checkout_onepage_success>

And turn it into

<checkout_onepage_success>
<reference name="root">
<action method="setTemplate"><template>page/2columns-right.phtml</template></action>
</reference>
<reference name="content">
<block name="checkout.success" template="checkout/success.phtml" type="checkout/onepage_success" />
</reference>
<reference name="before_body_end">
<block name="google_adwords_tracking" template="checkout/google_adwords_tracking.phtml" type="core/template" />
</reference>
</checkout_onepage_success>

Create the “app/design/frontend/default/my_custom_theme/template/checkout/google_adwords_tracking.phtml” file and copy-paste the the Adwords tracking JavaScript code into it.

This code relies on

< ?php echo $this?>getChildHtml(’before_body_end’) ?>

block call from footer of each …

This post describes how Magento navigation works. I hope it will help you.
The begining of all is in template file: “category/navigation/top.phtml”

<ul id="nav">
< ?php
foreach ($this->getStoreCategories() as $_category): ?>
< ?php
echo $this->drawItem($_category);
?>
< ?php endforeach ?>
</ul>

There we call the method from class Mage_Catalog_Block_Navigation $this->getStoreCategories(). This method returns the array $_nodes from object Varien_Data_Tree_Node_Collection.
This array contains objects of Varien_Data_Tree_Node.
Every node is object of Varien_Data_Tree_Node and it is extension from Varien_Object.
Example 1:
If we wish to see how much categories we have, we can do it with method showed below:

< ?php
echo $this->getStoreCategories()->count();
?>

We will get only number …

In order to speed things up with building admin sections under System > Configuration area in Magento I wrote a little blank extension. Hopefully its a step or two beyond “Hello world” level. I named the extension “CoolDash”, short from CoolDashboard. Name holds no special meaning, just something I popped out of my head. First thing you might notice when you open config.xmls and system.xml is the attribute naming. I intentionally used names like “somecooldashmodel2″. I found it extremely difficult, error prone and annoying to get around in scenarios where …

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 …

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 …

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 …