Comments for ASchroder.com

Comment on 15 Action Items taken from IRWD 2010 by Mark Hammersley

Mark Hammersley — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:32:05 +0000

Great post Ashley.

I think you hit on something with search as Magento’s native one is pretty crap. I have to spend a lot of time manually looking at the searches and creating redirects to the correct pages. Also I am finding that the position of the search box on the home page is very important.

Mark

Comment on 15 Action Items taken from IRWD 2010 by Robert

Robert — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:30:19 +0000

Great insights from the IRWD, Ashley. Thanks for taking the time to write them up.

We are also working on ways to improve the customer experience on the sites we work on. Having intuitive product pages with the least amount of “noise” is something we put a lot of importance on. By noise I mean things that explain what the user needs to do. This should be taken care of by an intuitive design as much as possible. From experience, people don’t really read most of the instructions in small type anyway. So, selecting product options needs to be as visual and intuitive as possible and feedback messages in case of error (and success) need to be obvious and context related.

The problem is that this increases the cost of implementation considerably which sometimes is difficult to justify to the site owner.

Comment on 3 Quick Methods To Diagnose Communication Problems between Magento and Google Checkout by Ashley

Ashley — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:25:07 +0000

If the order goes through Google but not into Magento, that normally means your callback is failing – check your Google integration console. Also the display of product line items in Google Checkout is not that pretty – particularly the discount item, and as you have noted configurable items just show up as the parent, with no configuration detail.

Comment on 3 Quick Methods To Diagnose Communication Problems between Magento and Google Checkout by Luke

Luke — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:50:40 +0000

Great information on the site. We are having trouble with the integrating Magento and Google Checkout.

The customer is able to make a purchase using google checkout (money goes into the account).
However, the data for the order does not go back into Magento; no data at all.

In addition when a customer uses Google Checkout information for the product is missing; size, customization (name and number).

We currently turned off google checkout but would love some advice.

Thank you very much,

Comment on Sitemap Submit – Magento Extension to Submit your Google Sitemap by Ashley

Ashley — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:08:20 +0000

Good question – thanks to Filipe my extension will submit the correct Magento store URL to Google, Yahoo, Bing etc however it looks like a display bug in the Magento Core renderer (Mage_Adminhtml_Block_Sitemap_Grid_Renderer_Link) that causes it to use this:

$this->htmlEscape(Mage::getBaseUrl('web') . $fileName);

when it should probably use:

Mage::app()->getStore($sitemap->getStoreId()) ->getBaseUrl(Mage_Core_Model_Store::URL_TYPE_LINK) . $fileName;

The htmlescape() I’m not sure about – can any URL characters actually mess with HTML? I guess there could be spaces etc in the url path, perhaps I should escape my url too – anyone confirm this?

Comment on Top 3 Solutions when your Magento Categories are not displaying by Ashley

Ashley — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:50:05 +0000

{{block type="catalog/product_list" category_id="YOUR_CATEGORY" template="catalog/product/list.phtml"}} is what you want – tripple check your category id. Also I see your ” quote marks render funny, might want to make sure they are really proper quote marks and not funny ones.

Comment on SMTP Pro Magento extension, free and open SMTP support for Magento by Ashley

Ashley — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:47:56 +0000

Please enable logging and send me the log output for several email actions (contact form, new account) and also for the self test. Also please include self test result output (if you get any).

Comment on SMTP Pro Magento extension, free and open SMTP support for Magento by Snake

Snake — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:25:00 +0000

Hi,

using magento 1.4
installed your extension, but i just get a blank page on any pages that try to send email, includign the self test.

Comment on Top 3 Solutions when your Magento Categories are not displaying by Muawiz

Muawiz — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:19:13 +0000

Hi,
i have try many time but i can not solve the problem. products are not showing on home page and also not showing category page. i am using
{{block type=”catalog/product_list” category_id=”4″ template=”catalog/product/list.phtml”}}
this line.
Help!

Comment on Sitemap Submit – Magento Extension to Submit your Google Sitemap by jerry

jerry — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:38:39 +0000

How to work in multi websites ? generate it , always main site url.