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 …

Many developers are familiar with the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern that is seemingly ubiquitous throughout web frameworks. Looking through the code in Magento, however, we see many other components besides the M’s the V’s and the C’s.
Each module  (a “module” meaning the separate directories within the “app/code/core/Mage” directory that comprise of Magento’s different functional areas) contains the usual Controller and Model. You’ll see that within each module, there are no Views (more on this later). You’ll also see extra tidbits, such as “helper” , “etc” and “sql”. These …

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 …

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 …

One of the coolest things in Magento is a form validation, and the way how it’s done. Magento uses Prototype library (which, personlay, I’m not a big fan of) to manage form validation. All you need to do when writing custom form is to assign a valid class names to your input fields. Here is an example of how your custom form might look in order to get use of automatic form validation.

<form name="<em><strong>my-custom-form</strong>" id="my-custom-form" action="" method="post">

<label for="firstname">< ?php echo $this->__(’First name’) ?> <span>*</span></label>
<input id="firstname" name="firstname" />

<label for="lastname">< ?php echo …

This is a popular bug that has been plaguing many people with their custom Magento solutions.
Problem: Magento shows products that are in stock as “Out of Stock” – It seems to be popularly reported within the New Product block.
Solution: The attribute “status” has not been selected in the product collection. This status attribute holds the information about whether or not the product is or is not in stock (among other items that determine if the item should be sale-able).
This attribute needs to be selected via the new product block code.
Find: …

One of my recent articles was on the subject of sorting “On Sale” product in Magento. The following is a cleaner and more advanced look at how—with few tricks and smart moves—you can reuse existing Magento code and modify it to suit your needs.
Product can be “on sale” in two ways:
1. when an item has a special price assigned to it on the individual level, or
2. when a special promotion “covers” the item
It is important to remember that you don’t have to set up the special price on each product …