MageDev

It’s been a long time since I updated my blog last time. You could probably think that I abandoned working with Magento . In fact quite opposite happened. I spent last two years working only on Magneto projects. Most of the time I spent working with large and medium companies running Magento software. At the same time invested into my own project. It should be up and running pretty soon and it will significantly extend Magento functionality.

Today I will start a new series of posts on my blog in which I will show the current state of Maganto platform and how it will develop in the future.

Back in 2008 when Varien released the first stable version of Magento More »

Several days ago I’ve been asked to review the new Magento book from Packt Publishing – the “Magento 1.4 Development Cookbook”. More »

It’s quite easy to add event observer in Magento with the use of config files (see Magento events on_create and on_update). However it might be desired to add observers during runtime and this requires a bit more work. More »

When dealing with multi-store Magento site I was wondering how easy it would be to override just a single template for selected store view. I was hoping that the ‘Add Exception’ [Admin -> System -> Configuration -> Design]option in admin panel would allow me to do this. Unfortunatelly when investigating More »

Using redirection in Magento controllers is not a rocket science thanks to Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Action::_redirect() and Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Action::_redirectUrl() methods. When trying to create redirection in CMS page (to prevent not logged-in users from accessing it) I found follwing code very helpful: More »

Although Magento comes with variety of product types out-of-the-box, sometimes it’s convenient to store specific product information with order data instead of product itself. For this purpose you can use Custom Options – after assigning options to specific product they will be displayed as a form. More »

Recently I encountered a bug described by fragilem17 at http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/51403/. Because the project I work on strongly rely on bundled products with custom options I needed to find solution to this problem. It wasn’t placed on Magento roadmap so I decided to try to solve it on my own. After spending over two days and producing 5 lines of code I guess I might win the slowest programming competition, but finally the module is fixed More »

Yesterday I had luck to pass Zend PHP 5 Certification Exam. There are different opinions about difficulty of Zend exam comparing to mock tests. I think they are on quite similar level. There were some tricky questions that require practical knowledge of PHP. It’s one of these situations when you get rewarded for banging your head against a brick wall while trying to solve bugs in PHP code. I used to be skeptical about exams (especially about tests) but it seems it would be hard to pass ZCE with just basic knowledge of PHP. All in all passing Zend Exam made my day!

Image manipulation in Magento is quite easy thanks to Varien_Image class defined in lib/Varien/Image.php file. Here’s a self-explained example of basic usage of this class: More »

Using event-observer pattern is simple yet powerful method to implode your own code into critical moments of application lifetime. Magento defines vast range of different events – just have a look at list of events for Magento 1.3.0 created by Branko Ajzele to get idea of various aspects of application flow you can amend just by using event-observer More »