Blog

What's New

In addition to the usual bug fixes, we have added some great new features, such as:

• New backend interface
• reCAPTCHA on Product review form
• New Magento-based reCAPTCHA theme
• Multiple language support
• Controller overriding redeveloped to minimise conflicts between different extensions

New backend interface

In the new version all reCAPTCHA related settings have been grouped into a single configuration area, which can be found in the Recaptcha section under a new Fontis Extensions tab. The screenshot below shows what settings can be adjusted.

Like rating summaries, custom options are stored separately to the product object. The best way to set them is to first create an array with the data for the option:

$options = array();
$options[$sku] = array(
 'title' => 'Option Title',
 'type' => 'radio',
 'is_require' => 1,
 'sort_order' => 0,
 'values' => array()
);
$options[$sku]['values'][] = array(
 'title' => 'Option Value 1',
 'price' => 0.00,
 'price_type' => 'fixed',
 'sku' => '',
 'sort_order' => '1'
);
$options[$sku]['values'][] = array(
 'title' => 'Option Value 2',
 'price' => 89.00,
 'price_type' => 'fixed',
 'sku' => '',
 'sort_order' => '1'
);

Note that the $options array has been created in this way to allow for multiple products to be filled out at once. Simply change values for more SKUs. This array can be filled out however is most appropriate for your system. This could be from an XML-RPC connection to another service, dynamically calculated values, or read from a CSV file. The sample values used in the above example should map logically to the values presented in the Magento product editor interface.

The underlying issue is that the 'Default Category' is not easily accessible in code. For example, the default top navigation in Magento uses the getStoreCategories() method to access all categories. But that method starts by returning the 'Default Category' child categories and never returns the 'Default Category' itself. A solution to this is to add a subcategory, such as 'Products', under the 'Default Category' so that we can effectively treat the 'Products' category as the root of the category tree. Adding a 'Products' category means that any subsequent categories need to be subcategories of the 'Products' category. With this change the top level navigation will only show the 'Products' category. A sample category tree is shown below.

Fontis is pleased to announce the official launch of the Magento Melbourne Users Group - MagMUG - and the inaugural meeting, taking place in two weeks time. MagMUG is an opportunity for anyone in the Melbourne area working with Magento to engage with others in the community.

Details of the first meeting can be found on the MagMUG site. At this stage, the plan is for meetings to be one hour long and consist of two presentations, followed by general discussion. The event will be informal and open to all, whether you are a store owner, administrator, user or developer, or just want to know more about Magento and the other people using it in the Melbourne area.

Product ratings are an important tool for gaining credibility and driving sales in any online store, and are yet another powerful feature built-in to the Magento core. Ratings can be a valuable criteria to make visible to people browsing the site, so rather than hide them away on product pages only, it can be desirable to display rating summary data elsewhere, or to use the data in developing other custom functionality. Review summaries work a little differently to other product data, so this post will demonstrate how to access them.

For all orders, Magento keeps a Comments History of all activity on that order. This allows an administrator to track changes that have been applied to the order status, as well as to attach comments for internal use or to be sent to the customer. If you are writing a custom extension that modifies orders then it's best to work within this system and to have your code update orders with the results of any processing done on them. This information can be invaluable for debugging and auditing purposes.

Magento allows several different ways to add products to the catalog, including manual editing, upload via spreadsheet and the web services Magento Core API. For developers who want to add products through PHP however, there are a few caveats to be aware of for the product to be displayed on the frontend.

The basics of adding a new product are trivial - you get a new copy of the appropriate model, fill in the details and call the save() method:

Working with large Magento collections in PHP can often cause problems with memory usage and, to a lesser extent, computational overhead. The common method of loading all objects in the collection quickly becomes problematic as collection size increases. For stores with thousands of products or categories, chances are you'll be running into PHP memory limits more often than not. This post explains how to process collections in a less memory intensive way and should be a starting point for working with any large collection.

The Magento Connect system is a vital part of the Magento ecosystem and has had a lot of success since it launched a bit more than a year ago. As always, there is room for improvement and hence we were very glad to see Varien provide the community with an opportunity to participate in the future direction of the system by running two surveys, one for extension users, and one for extension developers. At the time of writing, we have fourteen community extensions and one commercial application listed on Connect, and the evolution of this service is something we have quite a few thoughts on. We completed the survey and thought we'd share our ideas on how 2.0 can take Connect to even greater heights. Read on for our suggestions from a developer perspective.

Sometimes, the unthinkable happens and an error occurs in your Magento system, causing everything to come grinding to a halt. Magento handles this by displaying a styled error page, which is better looking than a white page full of error text. However, the error page still doesn't look very professional, and potentially discloses information that could be abused by a malicious user. This post details a method for using a custom error page, and outlines some of the benefits of doing so.