• TDO Mini Forms : comes with a lot of options that specify who can publish what and how new posts are moderated
• FV Community News

http://www.ixedit.com/

• Wufoo (hosted),
• MachForm onsite application available for less than 100 dollars,
• FormAssembly hosted (on site version available for a few thousand dollars),
• FormBuilderPro (hosted and onsite application)
• Experimental Free opensource jquery form builder
• [2009-10-23 edit] Sonoku’s Form Builder

They all have very nice interfaces including data gathering and statistics but the one I loved best was MachForm that is also distributed as a standalone application fro a very reasonable price. It uses Jquery as the main javascript library and lets the user build forms using drag and drop. One good idea is the composite field that lets the user add adresse field in one click. The screenshot below displays my own translation of the admin interface to french.

there is one folder for shipment, one for invoice, and one for credit. The product display occurs in the DEfault file where the Mage_Sales_Model_Order_Pdf_Items_Abstract is defined. What I did was simply instanciate a product object using the id from order / items, and get the image file using the following code in the draw function :

There are a lot of discussions going on about Magento’s one page checkout procedure : it is supposed to enhance customer payment experience by probviding ajax based single page order progress. But there are alos some discussions in the forum on how to enhance this process which is quite unusual and might discourage some customers. In a previous post I reviewed the code that produces sidebar shopping cart in default pages with right margin. The solution below explains how to add a full shopping cart display for the customer’s that trying to complete an order.

Full template vs AJAX based loading

The code that builds the one page checkout (checkout/onepage/) sidebar display is made of two separate components :

• the first loading of the page is a full template loading, meaning every component of the page is loaded at once, and returned to the browser via a standard HTTP request, returning HTML. The HTML produced at this stage for the right column is described in the checkout_onepage_index section of the layout/checkout.xml configuration file. I added the shopping cart display by  simply adding a block to the right :

         <reference name="right">
              <action method="unsetChildren"></action>
              <block type="checkout/onepage_progress" name="checkout.progress" before="-" template="checkout/onepage/progress.phtml"/>
              <block type="checkout/cart_sidebar" before="-" name="catalog.cart.sidebar"    template="checkout/cart/sidebarCheckout.phtml"/>
        </reference>

• Following steps are processed via AJAX calls (function reloadProgressBlock in opcheckout.js) that invoke the the checkout_onepage_progress section of the layout/checkout.xml configuration file. Below you’ll find the same code added to this section, that adds a cart block to the raw HTML returned by this AJAX call.

     <checkout_onepage_progress>
          <!-- Mage_Checkout -->
          <remove name="right"/>
          <remove name="left"/>
   <block type="checkout/cart_sidebar" output="toHtml"  name="catalog.cart.sidebar"    template="checkout/cart/sidebarCheckout.phtml"/>
  
          <block type="checkout/onepage_progress" name="root" output="toHtml" template="checkout/onepage/progress.phtml">
              <block type="checkout/onepage_payment_info" name="payment_info">
                  <action method="setInfoTemplate"><method></method><template></template></action>
              </block>
          </block>
  
      </checkout_onepage_progress>

You will notice that we deliberately position the sidebar cart XML block , in the first case after, and in the second case before other blocks, so that this block always appears first on your one page chcekout right margin. What you finally need now in order for this to work is to code the sidebarCheckout template : take the checkout/cart/sidebar.phtml  template and modify the display to produce best reassuring order total for your customer before he finally decides to pay !

We’ve not covered PHP based file explorers yet : they are indeed an essential component of any serious web application. When Ajax comes in the game, browsing, uploading and dealing with files is as easy online as it can be on your desktop. Thos willing to develop might be interested in extjs grid views, while application developpers looking for a working and bug free component have the choice of two or three opensource components available. All of them have the following features

• access control
• flash based and  / or FTP upload for big files 
• file viewing / previewing
• drag and drop folders

The choice is rought. For integration into a Wysiwyg editor such as FCKEDitor, we preferred the  Ajax file manager from PHPLetter because it is light and does not come with a huge infrastructure. For a quick access to web based files, we prefered ExtPLorer because the interface is based on the famous ext js library. As a new challenger on this area, ajaXplorer comes with a nice polished layout (picture above), a MP3 player (DEWPLayer) and a FLV player. But lacks translation into most languages.

“<?php echo $_product->getAttributeName() ?>
There is one thing different here though. If your Attribute Code is “shirt_size”, then you would use getShirtSize(). Remove the underscores and capitalize the first letter of each word. It is picky that way. if you use getshirtsize(), it won’t work.

If you are using a dropdown or a multiple select, you have to call it a little differently:

<?php echo $_product->getAttributeText(’shirt_size’) ?>

This method requires the actual Attribute Code. If you are displaying the value from a dropdown, you’ll get exactly what you need with this call. If you are wanting to display the values from a multiple select, it will return an array.“

Inner workings

How does this work ? well the attribute function is a method of the Mage_Catalog_Model_Product, which isn extension of Mage_Catalog_Model_Abstract, itself extending Mage_Core_Model_Abstract, itself extending Varien_Object where we find the famous __call function that traps all undeclared or undefined  functions from the class : this is where the logic is implemented and we see that any undeclared function starting with get is defined to fin the associated data , optionnally using provided arguments :