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. …

Hi everyone. I wrote this little plugin while working on one of our projects. If you know your way around WordPress then you know what $wpdb variable stands for. Imagine the following scenario. You have WordPress installation on one database, Magento on another. You know your way around SQL. You can always make new object based on WPDB class inside your template files giving it database access parameters, or you can use this plugin and use $MAGEDB the same way you use $wpdb.
Below is a little example of using $MAGEDB …

Description:  

With themes based off the Modern Theme, product information tabs are buried under JavaScript. This is awful for SEO. Converting these to CSS allows the Search Engines to index more information on the product pages. This article will tell you how to do that and improve the Search Engine friendliness of your Magento site!

About the Author:

CoolBlueLogo is a Promotional Product Ecommerce site. Helping marketing professionals achieve success with their incentive and customer loyalty campaigns. CoolBlueLogo is Jonathan Martin, he can be reached at jonathan@coolbluelogo.com.
Search engines typically only read visible page …

Adding and removing javascript and css is handled separately within Magento. CSS is added in the usual fashion, where you have a <link rel=”stylesheet”… />. However, any included javascript (unless linked to “by hand” from a theme’s skin) is pulled via a php files which reads through the “js” folder in the root directory (root/js/index.php is responsible for this).
That is all well and good for Magento. The real question is how we, as developers, add these items when we need them. How you as a developer add css or javascript …

How many people were disappointed to install Magento’s test data and find out that the home page “Best sellers” was just pain HTML placed into the CMS home page? I certainly was one of those people. That’s why I decided to create a Bestseller Module that was dynamic and harnessed the power of Magento’s built in features. This post shows you the code and gives and explanation of what is happening.
For those of you impatient to get to the code, here it is:

<?php
//bestseller module – grabs from all products, returns …

Hi All -
Finally time for a new post! (Something I’m surprised I haven’t covered yet).
This post will inform you on how to run Magento code outside of Magento. All you need is to have access to Magento’s ‘app/Mage.php‘ file.
This will be handy code for a few things:

Integration with 3rd party items – shared sessions, or just shared themes
Ajax calls – although not the preferred solutions for Ajax calls, it is a quick and easy one

To expand on these ideas a bit more:
Integration:
-You can use this code to output HTML that …

Recently one of our clients needed and info on Affiliate module for Magento. When it comes to Magento, word “module” is loosely related. Sure, every module needs config files in order to report it’s “connection” to Magento core. Modules like this, Affiliates for all, are modules I consider loosely related to core. They are in one or another way connected to Magento but they are self standing, independent, applications.
Installation of Affiliate module is a trivial task. It mostly comes down to extracting downloaded archive file to a web accessible directory …

Recently I have been working on a custom checkout page for one of our clients in Sweden. I had some trouble figuring out how to send default Magento order email with all of the order info. After an hour or so of studying Magento core code, here is the solution on how to send email after successful order has been made.

< ?php
$order = new Mage_Sales_Model_Order();
$incrementId = Mage::getSingleton(’checkout/session’)->getLastRealOrderId();

$order->loadByIncrementId($incrementId);

try
{
$order->sendNewOrderEmail();
} catch (Exception $ex) {  }
?>

Not sure how useful this alone will be for you, so I’ll throw a little advice along the way. …

For those of you who are into kinky stuff I made a simple, more of a proof of concept, application that sits in Widnows taskbar and shows the order info in balloon popup. Took me little more than half of hour to get this working. Almost forgot how great C# is
Magento has this great feature, rss feed for orders. You can access it via link http://myshopsite/rss/order/new. It requires authentication, so you need to provide Magento user and pass to access this link. Idea I wanted to play around …