Here are some of the best Magento extensions that I’ve come across.

• Magento Live Chat – This free module will provide LiveChat support in Magento.
• Fontis WYSIWYG Editor – This extension gives you the option to enable a JavaScript WYSIWYG editor to specified admin pages. Currently available editors are: TinyMCE and FCKeditor.
• Lazzymonks Twitter – Displays Twitter updates in the menu and allows updates from within the admin panel.
• Events Calendar – With this extension, you can display an events calendar on your website. Events are stored in the database. You can also display the upcoming list of events quickly by calling a block in your template.
• Blog – Full featured blog extension for Magento.
• Raffle – This module gives you basic functionality to run your own raffles.
• Customer Groups Configurable Catalog – This extension enables you to hide categories and products from customers depending on the customer group.
• Exploded Menu – Replaces the standard single column drop down with a multi-column dropdown featuring 2nd and 3rd level menu items.
• Velite Magento Superstage – Functionality, intuitive interaction and product presentation with really high detailed images are the main features.
• Magento EasyLightbox – This small extension will help to install Lightbox widget. Installation and configuration will take approximately 5 minutes. No files are replaced and no codding experience needed to install!
• Magento Exploded Menu – Replaces the standard Magento menu with a multi-column drop down menu system.

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.

Migrating your Magento website to another server is relatively a simple task once you know how to do it of course. I have detailed the steps on how to do this below so you can use this post as a point of reference 🙂

1. From the admin, go to Configuration -> Web -> and change the (Unsecure and Secure) fields to {{base_url}}.
2. From the admin, go to System -> Tools -> Backups and click on the backup button. This will create a backup of your database.
3. Make a copy your Magento root.
4. Move all data over to the new server.
5. Restore the database on the new host.
6. If you have a different username, password or database name. You’ll need to update that as well. You can find the file in (‘magento_root/app/etc/local.xml’) and make the required changes.
7. Navigate to your Magento root, and delete all of the files and folders in, (i.e. /var/www/magento/var) except for the .htaccess file.

Hope this helps someone 🙂

I’ve been working with Magento for some time now. I found myself searching for help countless times on the Magento website. I thought it would be useful to have a search feature built right into Firefox’s list of search engines to search the Magento site. So I went through Mozilla’s Developer Center and found instructions on the Open Search Syntax. So here you go, you can download it here. Hope you find it helpful!

I also have one for PHP which comes in handy as well. If your interested, you can grab it here.

Recently I obtained a copy of Magento Beginner’s Guide by William Rice from Packt Publishing. This book is great, I would recommend it to any new or existing Magento store owner. It servers as an excellent reference guide for experienced users and a great beginners guide for new store owners.

Magento is the world’s most evolved e-commerce solution and runs on the Apache/MySQL/PHP platform. From one installation, users can control multiple storefronts, all sharing customer and product information. Magento’s templates and themes enable users to customize the look and feel of their store, even optimizing it for mobile phones. Extensions enable them to connect Magento to a large number of payment gateways and shipping services.

Customizing Magento could be difficult. Here is an easy way to display any block in any template file that cannot be loaded with $this->getChildHtml().

If you’ve just started working with Magento, you’ll find that figuring out which class is loaded in the current template file very difficult. Here’s a little snippet that helps you figure it out. Just place the following into any .phtml template files:

or

or

If you’ve ever wanted to add new products in your Magento home page, it’s fairly easy to implement. Go to “CMS” then “Manage Pages” and select “Home Page” from the list of pages. Now paste this code snippet to show products labeled as “new” on your front page:

(Note that you must have some new products in your catalog for anything to show when you do this. This doesn’t mean that you’ve recently added them; only products explicitly marked as new using “Set Product as New from Date” and “Set Product as New to Date” options in the “General” product information page in the admin tool will be shown.)