Magento Specials prices

There is a feature that prsetashop comes with in its default installation, that is cruelly missing in Magento : the ability to display specials on the website, either on the margin of the home page and category pages, or inside a specifi page. But as always, there are already many discussions going on about this subject, and a community extension has been released, does the job fine but the whole subject  needs more investigation.

• The Catalog Sale Item community extension comes with its own xml layout page,  phtml design template, and Mage_Catalog_Block_Layer_View / Mage_Core_Block_Template class extensions. It creates a new page that displays all products currently on sale.
• Activecodeline publishes some code that extends the product list view to enable sorting products by specials price.
• Inchoo publishes an alternative category list view that displays only products in promotion or with special price, to be selecetd from the category / custom design menu.
• Magento’s forum has a dedicated “special price products” discussion that exlains how to use the product collection with specific query attributes to select only proucts with special price.