Those of you who know what SVN is, feel free to skip this article. Those of you who are not familiar with SVN, this is a must-read. If you use standard FTP to upload all Magento files, you may find this process very time consuming. Magento 1.1.8 has over 6.700 files in over 2.200 folders. FTPing can sometimes take few hours on some servers. Let’s look at alternatives.
Both alternatives require SSH access to the server. I’m aware that some low quality webhosting providers do not provide you with SSH info …

It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been working on Magento quite actively last two months. I noticed this negative trend in my blogging; more I know about Magento, the less I write about it. Some things just look so easy now, and they start to feel like something I should not write about. Anyhow…. time to share some wisdom with community
Our current client uses somewhat specific (don’t they all) store set. When I say specific, i don’t imply anything bad about it. One of the stand …

Quite a few people have asked me for a price filter functionality that comes with Magento. Mostly, the questions are same: How does one put the price filter anywhere on the page? How does one set it’s on price ranges in that filter? What defines default price ranges. Is it possible to set price filter for all my products instead of just single category? Lot of questions. The answer might be simpler then you might think.
There are two ways to approach this problem. Head trough wall or stop and think …

If you worked with osCommerce, Zen Cart, CRE Loaded or any similar eCommerce platform before, you might find Magento database structure quite confusing when you see it for the first time. I advise you not to rush too much figuring out what is what by glancing through database. Try to spend first few hours getting familiar with some background. For purposes of flexibility, the Magento database heavily utilizes an Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) data model. As is often the case, the cost of flexibility is complexity. Is there something in Magento that …

One of the most edited file in Magento is the template file View.phtml file. Reason for this is that a lot of clients would like to rearrange it differently on their online stores. Here is the analysis of that file and the list of all the methods it uses.
Magento product view page analysis (ready for print PDF)
Document above reflects Magento 1.1.6. methods and classes.
One thing to keep in mind, this document shows you the View.phtml block file and shows you it’s inherited methods. All of the Magento block files have …

There are many new Magento stores that are published each day. If you are with Magento for a longer time, you will also notice that many of those look similar to default or modern Magento theme. Creating an totally unique and custom one can be a difficult process, easpecially taking into consideration number of different interfaces we have. This is why many Magento developers choose to use the CSS from one of mendioned Magento themes that come with default installation and style those up. This is not a bad choice …

In one of my previous articles I showed you how to use getModel and getData methods in Magento. Although we should not put those to methods at the same level, since I’d say the getModel is a bit more higher. Higher in sense, you first use the geModel to create the instance of object then you use getData to retrieve the data from that instance. I have said it before, and I’m saying it again; Magento is a great peace of full OOP power of PHP. It’s architecture is something …

Magento comes packed with a lot of options. But no matter how many options you put into some product you can never cover all of them. One of such options (for now) is a color switcher in Magento. To be more precise, an image switcher based on color selection.
Recently I’ve made a screencast on my site on this subject, with somewhat different title. The idea is to have a dropdown box from which you choose a color and based on the color selection product image changes. All of this is …

One of the problems working under the hood of the Magento CMS is determining the context of $this. If you are about to do any advanced stuff with your template, besides layout changes, you need to get familiar with Magento’s objects (classes).
Let’s have a look at the /app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/product/view.phtml file. If you open this file and execute var_dump($this) your browser will return empty page after a short period of delay. By page I mean on the product view page; the one you see when you click on Magetno product. Experienced users …

There are three types of product relations in Magento: Up-sells, Related Products, and Cross-sell Products.  When viewing a product, Upsells for this product are items that your customers would ideally buy instead of the product they’re viewing.  They might be better quality, produce a higher profit margin, be more popular, etc. These appear on the product info page. Related products appear in the product info page as well, in the right column. Related products are meant to be purchased in addition to the item the customer is viewing. Finally, Cross-sell …