Customy

Magento front-end alert messages are usually not the elements you style when developing a theme. Because of that almost all Magento websites use default alert styles. Even if the theme is highly modified it is enough to look at the alerts to be able to tell that a website was built on Magento. This requires the following:
Let's change the default alert messages styles with a little help of bootstrap:
We are not going to integrate bootstrap to Magento theme, we are only replicating the styles of alert messages.

Read More

In my previous post I started to research the problems of default search of records in Magento administrative panel.

We have discussed the problem of product name related search in Manage Products Grid and offered our own solution which allows to search products using random word order in a search request.

In this post I will continue to dwell in the topic of records search. This time we will take a close look at the problems that arise while using Global Record Search.

Read More

Store administration can be a rather difficult task when one has to deal with a big amount of information. In Magento it is always a products catalog and both orders and clients lists. How to find a required product with several thousands or tens of thousands products? And how to find a client among tens of thousands records?

In such case one can use search. Magento administrative panel allows usage of comprehensive search through all the elements (Global Record Search), i.e. in one search field one can look for products, orders and clients.

It is often necessary to find a product according to its name when site administrator doesn't exactly remember it.

Read More

One picture is better than a thousand words. You will find this common truth in any textbook on marketing. 

One video is better than a thousand pictures and even than a thousand words. Any SEO expert will tell you this.

One can find in the Internet many ready to use Magento extensions (both free and paid)  that allow to add a video to the product page.

Unfortunately, sometimes the extensions do not meet our requirements or design tasks.

In this post you will learn how to add a video to a Magento product page exactly where it should be according to the design or other requirements.

Read More

As it is known Magento allows to manage the products inventory. Together with this one can order by default only those products that are in stock. Herewith there is a possibility to order even those products that are out of stock (backorders), namely when their number (stock) is either 0 or lower than a minimal quantity (Qty for Item's Status to Become Out of Stock attribute). 

In order to make out of stock products orders possible it is necessary to state that for such products backorders are allowed, namely the number of products in stock can be negative.

The problem that arises in such a case is that customers see that a product is out of stock (in case that availability is displayed in attribute settings for the product) but at the same time there is the Add to Cart  button both on category page and the product page.Not all customers pay attention to the fact that the product is out of stock while making an order which can result in an unpleasant situation when a product is not shipped on time and a customer's expectations are not fulfilled.

One of the solutions for such a situation can be changing the Add to Cart button to the Pre-order button.

If you wish to display Pre-Order button instead of Add to Cart when the product quantity is 0, here's how to do it.

Read More

It is known that for many customers the main factor for making an order is the possibility to have a discount. It is enough to state both a product's retail price and its special price to make a customer happy.

Unfortunately this approach doesn't work well with all customers, as people want to know not only how much they will pay for a certain product but the percentage of the discount they will receive as well. One of the main principles that determines the work of deal sites such as Groupon is to offer various products and services with a discount of 40% and higher. In this case a psychological factor works and it is not important what the initial cost of a product was but the amount of the discount that a customer gains.

If you wish to show product discount percent next to product price or somewhere on a product page, here's how you do it.

Read More

If you wish to redirect customers to specific page after newsletter subscription, here's how.
Copy
app\code\core\Mage\Newsletter\controllers\SubscriberController.php
to
app\code\local\Mage\Newsletter\controllers\SubscriberController.php
Open the created local file. Find in two places:

$this->_redirectReferer();

Change it to:

$this->_redirectUrl(Mage::getBaseUrl());

That will redirect user to the home page after newsletter subscription. If you wish to redirect to specific page, use this:

$this->_redirectUrl(Mage::getBaseUrl().'cms-page-identifier');

Thats it. Now you control the page the user is redirected after newsletter subscription in magento.

If you are using Fooman pdf customiser and have modified your currency tag according to our tutorial, probably you will have trouble on pdf printouts, as the price will be something like: <span>$</span>22.00
To fix that issue open: app\code\community\Fooman\PdfCustomiser\Model\Mypdf.php
Find public function OutputTotalPrice and replace it with this:

    public function OutputTotalPrice($price, $basePrice,$displayBoth,$order)
    {
        $priceForPrint = strip_tags($order->formatPriceTxt($price));
        
        if($displayBoth){
            $this->MultiCell(2.25*$this->getFontSizePt(), 0, $priceForPrint, 0, 'R', 0, 0);
        }
        $this->MultiCell(0, 0, $priceForPrint, 0, 'R', 0, 1);
    }

The key word is "strip_tags" which clears all html tags and gives us clean currency and price

 

There are still store owners who care about customers surfing with Internet Explorer (IE) 6. Recently I was working on IE6 compatibility issues and found the problem which was easy to fix. "Update Shopping Cart" button on shopping cart page doesn't work in IE6. To fix that issue open app\design\frontend\[yourpackage]\[yourtheme]\template\checkout\cart.phtml
Find:

<form action="<?php echo $this->getUrl('checkout/cart/updatePost') ?>" method="post">

Change it to:

<form name="update_form" action="<?php echo $this->getUrl('checkout/cart/updatePost') ?>" method="post">

Find:

<button type="submit" title="<?php echo $this->__('Update Shopping Cart') ?>" class="button btn-update"><span><span><?php echo $this->__('Update Shopping Cart') ?></span></span></button>

Change it to:

<button onclick="document.getElementById('update_form').submit();" type="submit" title="<?php echo $this->__('Update Shopping Cart') ?>" class="button btn-update"><span><span><?php echo $this->__('Update Shopping Cart') ?></span></span></button>

Now the update cart button works in IE6.

Set quality of magento catalog product images directly in template files.

There is no need to dublicate and edit core files or adapters. New method called setQuality has been implemented since Magento CE 1.4 and can be used directly in template files.

Read More