Links : 25 free templates for Magento

• You can use a linux script to automatically modify magento email template files in your language / email folder
  • script 1
    http://www.osetemplates.com/?p=138
  • script 2 (slightly better because incorporates store specific vairables in the script)
    http://www.pridedesign.ie/content/magento-email-template-script
• You can also use the email template adapter extension to get the job done via magento’s administration interface

http://simplecartjs.com/

There are many discussions on whether oscommerce is dead or not. From an industry where every six months new products come online with ever more exciting new features, the longevity of Oscommerce, the first opensource e commerce application, is a good example of a bad designed  application theat does the job well. Os commerce evolution has stopped in 2005, when the first preview of the MS3 version – not yet released as of today – went public. What struck me with tomatocart is the backend interface, based on ext js desktop layout with charts by piwik / openchart flash . More info on http://www.tomatocart.com/

I’ve finally released my first Magento website, and it proves to be a  real SEO winner (100% increase in visits after 2 weeks). RuedeSiam is a furniture importer based in Brittany. Now you know why I bothered comparing commercial and opensource Flash based zoomers : Rue de Siam’s website site features an implementation of image  a flash based zoom within a prototype lightbox gallery  (check out this one) . Interesting too is the specific template for the “At your home” showcase category that uses products with  specific layout. Magento is really great for customising layouts, I suppose that’s partly a big feature of Zend Framework expressed at its best. One technique I used a lot is the css based text over image transparency effect that I detailed a while ago for Wordpress on this blog. Works fine with Magento images categories except that the background image really has to be adjusted perfectly so I used phpthumbs instead of Magento’s resizing helpers that seemed to complicated to understand at first.   I’ve also covered  various development challenges that I shared on this blog during the development :

• products special display on home page,
• display new product icon on product list
• how to display products from other categories on the product view page

And a few tips :

• Display custom attributes on product page
• Magento static blocks display

One advice : once you’re running a Magento production web site, be careful with upgrades. The Sales extension did not work with 1.3.0 on my development server and I’m sticking to 1.2.x for the moment.

• Step 1 : create the product special block  class/ Note that the getSpecialProducts function is inspired from the sales catalog list extension
  create the file app\code\local\PoleOuest\Catalog\Block\Product\Special.php
  1. <?
  2. class PoleOuest_Catalog_Block_Product_Special extends Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_Abstract
  3. {
  4. protected function _getStoreId()
  5. {
  6. $storeId = null;
  7. if($storeId == null) {
  8. $storeId = Mage::app()->getStore()->getId();
  9. }
  10. return $storeId
  11. }
  12. protected function _getCustomerGroupId()
  13. {
  14. $custGroupID = null;
  15. if($custGroupID == null) {
  16. $custGroupID = Mage::getSingleton(‘customer/session’)->getCustomerGroupId();
  17. }
  18. return $custGroupID;
  19. }
  20.  
  21. // POLEOUEST Method from salescatalog
  22. public function getSpecialProducts()
  23. {
  24. if (is_null($this->_productCollection)) {
  25. $storeId = $this->_getStoreId();
  26. $websiteId = Mage::app()->getStore($storeId)->getWebsiteId();
  27. $custGroup = $this->_getCustomerGroupId();
  28. $product = Mage::getModel(‘catalog/product’);
  29. $todayDate = $product->getResource()->formatDate(time(), false);
  30. $rulePriceWhere = "({{table}}.rule_date is null) or ({{table}}.rule_date=’$todayDate’ and {{table}}.website_id=’$websiteId’ and {{table}}.customer_group_id=’$custGroup’)";
  31. $productAttributes = array_flip(Mage::getSingleton(‘catalog/config’)->getProductAttributes());
  32. unset($productAttributes[‘price_type’]);
  33. unset($productAttributes[‘price_view’]);
  34. $productAttributes = array_flip($productAttributes);
  35. $specials = $product->setStoreId($storeId)->getResourceCollection()
  36. ->addAttributeToFilter(’special_price’, array(‘gt’=>0), ‘left’)
  37. ->addAttributeToFilter(’special_from_date’, array(‘date’=>true, ‘to’=> $todayDate), ‘left’)
  38. ->addAttributeToFilter(array(
  39. array(‘attribute’=>’special_to_date’, ‘date’=>true, ‘from’=>$todayDate),
  40. array(‘attribute’=>’special_to_date’, ‘is’ => new Zend_Db_Expr(‘null’))
  41. ), ”, ‘left’)
  42. ->addAttributeToSort(’special_from_date’, ‘desc’)
  43. ->addAttributeToSelect($productAttributes, ‘inner’)
  44. ->joinTable(‘catalogrule/rule_product_price’, ‘product_id=entity_id’, array(‘rule_price’=>‘rule_price’, ‘rule_start_date’=>‘latest_start_date’, ‘rule_date’=>‘rule_date’), $rulePriceWhere, ‘left’)
  45. ;
  46.  
  47. $specials->getSelect()->order(new Zend_Db_Expr(‘RAND()’))->limit(1); ;
  48. $rulePriceCollection = Mage::getResourceModel(‘catalogrule/rule_product_price_collection’)
  49. ->addFieldToFilter(‘website_id’, $websiteId)
  50. ->addFieldToFilter(‘customer_group_id’, $custGroup)
  51. ->addFieldToFilter(‘rule_date’, $todayDate)
  52. ;
  53.  
  54. $productIds = $rulePriceCollection->getProductIds();
  55. if (!empty($productIds)) {
  56. $specials->getSelect()->orWhere(‘e.entity_id in (’.implode(‘,’,$productIds).‘)’);
  57. }
  58.  
  59. Mage::getSingleton(‘catalog/product_status’)->addVisibleFilterToCollection($specials);
  60. Mage::getSingleton(‘catalog/product_visibility’)->addVisibleInCatalogFilterToCollection($specials);
  61. $this->_productCollection = $specials;
  62. }
  63. return $this->_productCollection;
  64. }
  65. }
  66. ?>
• Step 2 : add new block to your etc/config.xml in global/blocks/catalog
  <rewrite>
  <product_special>PoleOuest_Catalog_Block_Product_Special</product_special>
  </rewrite>
• Step 3 : create your template catalog/product/PoleOuestSpecial.phtml with the loop inspired from the catalog/product/list.phtml
• Step 4 : declare your block in your layout/catalog.xml in the right.permanent.callout block
  <block type=”catalog/product_special” name=”product_special” as=”product_special” template=”catalog/product/PoleOuestSpecial.phtml” />
• Step 5 : call your child HTML where you want it in \template\callouts\right_col.phtml :
  <?php echo $this->getChildHtml(’product_special’) ?>

and let us know how it went for you

How to load new attribute : in Magento the new attribute is defined by two database fields (or attributes) : new from and new to .

• Using these parameters in list.phtml requires you to modify the attribute set returned by the Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_List class to be found in app\code\core\Mage\Catalog\Block\Product\List.php
• in function _getProductCollection, paste the following line
  $this->_productCollection
  ->addAttributeToSelect(’news_from_date’)
  ->addAttributeToSelect(’news_to_date’);
• obvisouly this comes just after the product collection definition around line 75 of the List.php
  $this->_productCollection = $layer->getProductCollection();
• your list.phtml template now has access to the data and checking that a product is new is as simple as performing PHP based date comparisons. We provide here basic comparison that will only work for products where both news_from and news_to have been filled. Add the following PHP code somewhere in your productcollection loop and the work is done !
  $now = date(”Y-m-d”);
  $newsFrom= substr($_product->getData(’news_from_date’),0,10);
  $newsTo=  substr($_product->getData(’news_to_date’),0,10);
  if ($now>=$newsFrom && $now<=$newsTo)
  {?> <h3 class=”nouveauteProductList” >NEW PRODUCT!<h3><?};
  ?>

This hack will be used on RueDeSiam’s website (to be released next month,bookmark it now!)

What we aim here is to setup an automatic  display of related products on a product view page, via the categories they belong to. We build two loops : one that gets categories the product belongs to, and another one inside that gets products of each category.

How to setup category related products in Product view :

1. add the following code somewhere in default\template\catalog\product\view.phtml
2. Configure the category query according to your catalog by uncommenting the following :
   • ->setPage(1, 1) : selects only one category
   • ->addFieldToFilter(’level’,”3″) : selects only 3rd level categories
   • ->addFieldToFilter(’parent_id’,”3″) : select only child categories of no 3
   • ->setOrder(”level”) : combined by setPage, returns the lowest level category
3. please that the product loop uses the $_product variable, which can be dangerous because this name is widely used. We use it here for comodity reasons because I just took toe display code from Magento’s product list view