Fontis Ecommerce Blog: Commerce Advice and Insights

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.

Recently, I wrote a blog post about preventing PO box customer addresses being registered at checkout. Following on from that post, I was asked a rather sensible question: "is it possible to disallow PO boxes for shipping, but allow them for billing?" The answer is yes, but it does require a few more modifications to Magento.

As mentioned in the original post, the if statements with regular expressions required to block PO boxes and locked bags are as follows:

Online retailing is a rapidly growing market and it is becoming an increasing necessity for anyone in retail in the 21st century to establish an online presence. Recognising this, National Media, a specialist B2B media and marketing company, are holding the inaugural Online Retailer Expo & Conference, which will focus on the state of eCommerce in Australia. It will also be a chance for retailers and vendors to make connections, share knowledge and ideas, and explore new business opportunities.

Sometimes to make advances in software one must break backwards compatibility. Nowadays, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) is a dinosaur of a browser. It's slow, non-standards compliant, lacks features and is a pain to develop for. As web developers, time constraints and other considerations frequently mean it's just not worth putting in the extra development effort to support it. In those cases, we will want to detect those visitors using IE6 as their browser so that we might explain that it is not supported and offer an alternative. Detecting the browser being used is known as "browser sniffing", and there are a number of methods that can be used.