Everyone’s encountered those standard 404 error pages that yield little or no information. Most new systems have this feature built in by default and often times are pretty fancy with informative to funny graphics and lots of options on what to do next but, if your working on updating an old site not using dynamically based web pages then, your going to have to add one manually. For your user’s experience, it’s better to provide a helpful error message and links to where they can continue on their quest for information. You don’t want to scare your visitors away do you? Here’s how to add your own custom 404 error page to your website:

If you don’t already have an .htaccess file in your servers root, go ahead and create one. Now you need to instruct .htaccess where your custom error page is. In this example, I have the 404 document which I created with my editor that provides lots of useful information for users to continue browsing my site. Now add this line to your .htaccess file and that’s it!

We all hate Leechers. Here’s how to stop them in their tracks from stealing your images and your bandwidth!

Sometimes you may need to redirect http requests on port 80 to (https) on port 443. This can easily be accomplished with .htaccess.

In order to run a SQL query against the Magento database, you first need a resource model then a database connection.

The Magento Database Repair Tool compares 2 databases (reference and target), and updates the target database so it has the same structure as the reference database by doing the following:

• Adds missing tables, or repairs them to have the same engine type and char-set.
• Adds missing fields or repairs them.
• Removes inconsistent data from tables that have broken foreign key references.
• Adds missing foreign keys and indexes.

You can download it here. For a full list of features and instructions, you can refer to this wiki post.

If you need to add additional fields to Magento’s default contact form, read on! First open the form.phtml file located in your /magento_root/app/design/frontend/YOUR_INTERFACE/YOUR_THEME/template/contacts/form.phtml. So, we are going to add a subject field to this contact form so that customers tell us the subject of their email. Open the file for editing in your favorite editor.

Find this section in the file below (this should be around line 39):

I’ve worked with Drupal in the past for several projects and have come across some modules that have become my favorites. Here they are:

Upgrading Magento to the latest version is a fairly simple task. Copy and Paste this key below VIA Magento Connect where it states “Paste extension key to install:”. This will upgrade Magento to the newest version.

Need to get the current category loaded? No problem! Just use this useful little snippet below. It will return an object of the current category.

Magento is truly a powerful and flexible platform! I enjoy working with it more and more every day. I recently came across the need to add a product to the cart VIA the Querystring/URL. Guess what? Magento can do it and I’ll show you how!

Simple products are the easiest to add because there are fewer options that need to be passed. The basic structure is as follows.

Where [id] is the Magento ID of the product and [qty] is the Quantity you wish to add.

To add a simple product with custom options simply add options[id]=[value] to the end. The basic structure is:

You can get the options id and value by viewing the source of the simple product page and it’s dropdowns.