Impulsis blog

How to style Success page in Magento

Wolf — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:52:00 +0200

Hello. Very often Magento projects aren't plain and simple. Customization is so deep that you need to edit even Success Order page. I will give a try to put together all info about this page.

1. Success page - page you see when you press "Order Now" button on Checkout and your order is accepted.

2. checkout.xml - here you can change page layout and add CMS blocks

3. Template file is located:

app/design/frontend/yourpackage/yourtheme/template/checkout/success.phtml

4. Now you are ready to style it. But there is a problem. When you click "Refresh" on Success page you will be redirected to empty Cart page. Styling is nightmare in this conditions.

Solution: Temporarily disable clearing session. Find this file app/code/core/Mage/Checkout/controllers/OnepageController.php and comment line 227

For viewing the code snippet, please visit our website.

5. Do all your styling magic according to designs, test for browser compatibility.

6. Important: Uncomment code you commented in step 4 because site will not work correct.

You are done! Show your result to the customer :)

Tested: Magento CE 1.6.0.x

How to create static menu with "act" effect using widgets in Magento

Wolf — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:19:00 +0200

Very often it is nessesary to create static menu for the store. This can be submenu in header or footer sections. Lots of designs force us to forsee act effect for this links. This is difficult to implement with CSS only, but much easer with widgets which are aviable in Magento Community Edition 1.4 or later.

Let's create this menu:

1. Create CMS Pages for your menu (About Us, Shipping info, Terms and Conditions etc.)

2. Create file for our widget here app/design/frontend/your_package/your_theme/template/cms/widget/link/cms_menu_link.phtml with the folowing code inside:

For viewing the code snippet, please visit our website.

3. Now create CMS block or use the one you have. We will use Footer links block here.

4. Click on "Insert Widget" button and in popup select "CMS Page Link" in Widget Type dropdown.
Fill fields "Anchor Custom Text" and "Anchor Custom Title" and in dropdown "Template" select "CMS Page Link Inline Template". After it is set up click on "Select Page" button and select desiered page (in our case we choose About Us). Then press "Insert Widget" in upper right corner.

5. You will receive the folowing code which will generate a link to About Us page.

For viewing the code snippet, please visit our website.

6. Now you should change template path for your widget. So change template="cms/widget/link/link_inline.phtml" to template="cms/widget/link/cms_menu_link.phtml".

7. Repeat steps 4-6 for all your links.

8. After you save the block it will generate menu with class "act" on active page. You can style it without any problems.

Hope this info will be useful.

Why you should consider migration to Magento?

Andy — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 14:42:00 +0200

In today’s fast-growing e-commerce world you have to keep-up with the newest trends in order to keep your sales on the appropriate levels, ensure business growth and keep your customers satisfaction on steadily high level. With the development of the new technologies the customers’ needs and requirements are becoming more and more sophisticated each time.

Sometimes you can find yourself in the situation, when your current e-commerce solution is not developing fast enough for your needs. This may be caused by inactive community of the developers, outdated technology used, custom CMS not supported by the developers, etc. In any way - this is a bad sign for your business and very good one for your competitors. In this situation worth considering the migration to other platform, that supports majority of the newest technologies, is flexible and has a strong community behind. One of those - it’s Magento e-commerce platform.

This post is not about the benefits of Magento relating to the other e-commerce platforms. If you are reading this, I presume you already know a lot on this topic. Here I would like to discover some pros and cons of the migration to Magento from the other system.

Cons:

All the custom development made for your project might be not compatible with Magento. However, in most cases we can use your code to build Magento based solution with exactly the same functionality, or to develop it from a scratch if needed.
Human and financial resources spending on migration
Sometimes migration can take a lot of time, depending on the project complexity. But in any case it will be less then develop totally new store.

Pros:

A lot of new features goes with Magento by default, no need to develop them.
Flexibility in customization according to your business needs.
Catalog management. If you have a webstore in most cases your can export the catalog and after some modifications easily import it to Magento using advanced import profiles. This will save you a lot of time and unnecessary work.
Design can be migrated as well, of course with additional development. But in most cases your customers should not feel a big difference after the migration.
Multiple stores management under one platform. Yes, with Magento you can have several completely different stores on one platform. Why it is so important? Because you can control all your business from one admin dashboard. You must agree that's just great.
Reports and analytics. Magento gives you a full control over information about your sales, orders, customers, search terms used by your customers, and a lot of other reports. All Magento stores also have integrated Google Analytics.
Export products
impressive community with a lot of free extensions available for downloading.
Easy Order control (create, edit, cancel, hold, approve)
Customizeable Marketing tools – coupons, discounts, newsletters, bestsellers, crossels, and featured products. It's only the minor part of the promotions you can get in Magento by default.
Incredible amount of options for your product, product attributes which you can easily create by yourself
Magento is Open Soure project – this means no monthly, yearly and other payments.

In any case it’s always up to you either to migrate to Magento or leave on your current system. Just keep in mind that you have this option in case if your business needs will exceed the actual possibilities of your current platform.

Magento mobile - iPhone customized theme for NicNacNoo

Wolf — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 10:50:00 +0200

Hello guys!

Today we will share with you our expirience with customization Magento theme for iPhone.

As you all know m-commerce market grows very fast. U.S. mobile commerce sales will grow 100% this year to $2.4 billion from $1.2 billion in 2009. By 2015, shoppers worldwide will spend $119 billion on goods and services purchased via mobile phones, representing about 8% of total e-commerce sales according to ABI Research.

Our customer needed a magento mobile version for his shop NicNacNoo.

As you know Magento version 1.4.1.0 has iPhone optimized theme by default, the only thing is to set it up correctly. But in our case we needed not only optimized theme, but also full customization according to brand style. So we have remade default theme to suit our client's needs.

First of all we changed company logo and general layout styles. Also we modified footer zone. As you have noticed Home Page in Magento iPhone theme doesn't have CMS content – only list of all categories. Here we had a problem because there were a lot of categories and it was total nightmare to scroll to the bottom. We resolved this by showing only first level categories. To reach the second and third you just click on the arrow on the left and categories expand. Clear and simple.

On product view we integrated our Gift Wrap module that was developed for main theme. At the bottom you can see how it looks.

Another thing we have noticed during development process – default theme wasn't optimized for "landscape" position. After digging online we have found script that can check in what position iPhone is "landscape" or "portrait". We've made some modification to this script. Now it adds classes "portrait" and "landscape" to the body tag. Then using this classes you can easily change width of your theme. You can see this script bellow.

For viewing the code snippet, please visit our website.

After you add this script you will need to add the following right after body tag starts. It will prevent "jumping" during browsing the site.

For viewing the code snippet, please visit our website.

Now when you rotate your iPhone - theme will fill the whole screen, because we have foreseen this :).

So if you have Magento shop and don't have iPhone optimized theme yet do not hesitate to order one.

Good luck!

How to choose a magento development agency?

Andy — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:07:00 +0200

Hi All.

In this article I would like to share with you some basics when selecting a magento development agency. I hope the article will help you to choose the developer that will implement your idea fast and painless. There are 2 options here:

a. Choose our company (have you had any doubts that we will promote ourselves in this article? ]:)
b. Continuing reading

Outsourcing

The “good side” of outsourcing is well known. You get the cheaper price. But there are the pitfalls as well, like time difference, lack of direct “face 2 face” contact, etc. But its benefits are correlative with shortcomings. Mostly in the price issues, as outsourcing may significantly reduce your expenses for the project. In case if the quality of the works are equal, there is no reason to pay more.

Quality

Not always the affordable magento development agency provides the quality product. The solution is simple - just have a look on their magento portfolio. It’s also worth trying to contact their customers to hear their opinion about this company. (btw, you can check out our magento portfolio)

Technical skills

Some of the development agency can create a very eye-catching design solution for you. But the technical skills of the team could be insufficient for your project. So, in order to find out if they are good enough, you can read though the case studies of their recent projects and see what integrations level they have implemented, how they are using Magento API for the automation purposes, what custom magento development modules they have created, etc.

Price

Almost each website has a Free Quote request form. Just fill it and know your price. And taking into consideration the portfolio works seen, you can make your choice easily

Contract

Be sure to sign the contract with the chosen company. This will save your risks and will ensure that you will not be mistreated.

NDA

Also worth considering in case if you want to keep your project closed for everyone, except the developers and you. Though, usually this agreement can be enclosed with the preliminary contract.

General notice:

Prior the submission of the Quote Request, you should clarify for yourself what exact product you are about to order. Check the similar websites, note down the list of resources with design you like most, create the list of the required functionality, etc. This will save your time, will help you to reject the unnecessary functionality and in the end to receive the appropriate estimation for time and quote for money.

Top 10 references that will skyrocket your digital painting skills

Odneoko — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 12:38:00 +0200

When dealing with magento development and typo3 development on the professional level, it's extremely important to deliver the product of utmost quality for the clients. That's why our webdesigners are constantly improving their webdesign skills to catch up with the most recent trends in this field.
Today I have decided to share some valuable resources, that our team is using (of have used), that could become helpful for your trainings in webdesign.

1. psd.tutsplus.com

Great resource with the detailed photoshop tutorials

2. webdesignledger.com

Here you can easily find tutorials, inspiration sources, free sets of brushes and textures

3. abduzeedo.com

Detailed tutorials, articles, webdesign overviews

4. www.onextrapixel.com

Great set of tutorials and free files for the work

5. www.smashingmagazine.com

One of the most valuable resources for the webdesigners. Here you can find literally everything :)

6. www.tutorial9.net

Photoshop tutorials split by level of complexity. Free sets of useful files are also available.

7. qbrushes.net

Free set of brushes.

8. qtextures.net

Free quality textures

9. www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk

Small blog with nice tutorials. Check it out!

10. adobe video workshop

Video tutorials for the newbies and experienced designers from Adobe

I hope this listing will be useful for you, as the professional webdesigner should never stop learning new things. Cheers.

Magento critical upgrade bug with baseURL

KoKos — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:35:00 +0200

Sun was shining, the weather was sweet, but today’s morning brought us an unpleasant gift of critical Magento upgrade bug.

The symptoms

One of the projects of our customer suddenly went down, after 1 week of successful work after the upgrade to Magento ver. 1.4.1.1. FE user was not able to browse the website initially, just stayed on the Home Page. All menu items were not resolving the URL, but were returning the IP address of the domain. Within 5 minutes the situation changed to even worse: the domain returned localhost instead of actual website.

The reason

After the analysis, we found out that the reason was in the obsolete for newest Magento versions file – distro.xml. This file was thrown out from the newest versions from Magento, but as long as we have upgraded this project from the older version (1.1.6), the system encountered the conflict. The complex system of the baseURL overrides was not using the default global values of the baseURL, and instead was putting the value, defined in the mentioned distro.xml - {{base_url}}. Hence, all the navigation was broken and the website was down.

NOTE : After some deeper investigation, we found out also that distro.xml was not present even in the initial set-up of Magento 1.1.6 Most probably, it was brought by some extension via Magento Connect.

Solution

The solution is extra-complex and requires enormous amount of knowledge and human resources to fix it. OR you just need to delete the distro.xml file from :) . That’s it. I hope you’ll not get into the mentioned troubles.

Cheers.