Blog

Adding Tabbed-View to Magento Default Theme

support@joomlavue.com (Eddy) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:35:03 +0000

Over the past few weeks, I've gotten a few requests by Magento users asking how to port Modern Theme's tabbed product view information to the Default Theme. Here it is, a step by step guide involving modifying template, layout and skin files.

And now, before you attempt to do any of the following, if you've tweaked your existing Default Theme before, make sure you backup your template and layout files so that you can refer back when you've done something wrong, play safe!. Ok, let's get started!

Paste the following block of template code into Default Theme's product view.phtml, located in app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/product/view.phtml, right before the closing div:

    getChildHtml('info_tabs') ?>

and within the same file, remove the following template logic block:


    getChildHtml('description')):?>
        
            
                __('Product Description') ?>
            
            
        
    
    getChildHtml('additional')):?>
        
            
                __('Additional Information') ?>
            
            
        
    
    getChildHtml('upsell_products') ?>
    getChildHtml('product_additional_data') ?>

Ubuntu Experience

support@joomlavue.com (Eddy) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:19:52 +0000

This is a short post I wrote in April last year on Open Source Community and since the site has been down for a couple of months now, I've managed to retrieve it back through Waybackmachine:

After much time and effort spent on battling with viruses on windows XP, I finally made a switch to linux, Ubuntu linux. I got to know Ubuntu about 2 years ago when comparing different kinds of linux distros. I've tried and done the installation of Mandrake 10, Suse 9.3, Fedora Core 3 & 4 and some other less known distros.

Of all the distro I've tried, it's undeniable that Ubuntu has the easiest interface to interact with, live cd running straight through cd-rom, easy installation and common softwares were included by default, such as open office, firefox, gaim and etc. Adding and removing program were as easy as a click and go, putting away all the bias that once said linux is only for geek. I am not a geek and I can do that, simply because Ubuntu linux got the power for me to do so.

Another sweet thing to mention is that we are allowed to request Ubuntu CDs for free with active community support.

A few stuff running on my ubuntu are open-office, evolution, gaim, skype and xchat, nothing else in particular. But the whole experence does amazed me and I am aware that this was a great move.

That's all for now, thanks Amy for encouraging me to write here, you should give your old pc a damn try on ubuntu, hehe.

The original article on opensourcecommunity.org

Fixing PHP DOMXPath Unicode issue

support@joomlavue.com (Eddy) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:15:54 +0000

I wrote a little script a couple months back, it was used to grab my friendster's friend listings, sort them by those who logged in within last 24 hours and had them bubbled up. It was working fine until lately, as some of the usernames were shown garbled. So I checked against their profile and it showed that a few of them are using chinese and korean characters (unicode).

The content of the script is shown below, it starts by grabbing the first page of my friendster and performs a regular expression match against the returned content based on the defined pattern, which is set to match those paging links ranging from 1 to 999 pages. It's purpose is to get the total number of pages and proceeds to loop through the total numbers, grabs the returned content, removes unused html objects and store them to $content variable.

So far $content variable contains intermigled ascii and unicode characters, but they are displayed correctly when outputted.

  ..
  $pattern = '';
  $null = preg_match_all($pattern, $content, $pages);
  ..
  $getUrl = "friends/$friendsterID/$i";
  ..
  //start looping
  $fp = fsockopen ("www.friendster.com", 80, $errno, $errstr, 30);
  fputs ($fp, "GET /$getUrl HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: www.friendster.com\r\nUser-Agent: MS Internet Explorer\r\n\r\n");
  while (!feof($fp)) {
      $content .= fgets($fp,1024);
  }
  ..
  $null = eregi("$fsStart(.*)$fsEnd", $content, $fsArray);
  $content = $fsArray[1];
  ..
  $fullContent .= $content;
  //end looping
  ..
  $dom = new DOMDocument();
  @$dom->loadHTML($fullContent );
  $xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
  $xpath_query = '//html/body/div/div';
  $entries = $xpath->query($xpath_query);
  ..
  $user = $entry->nodeValue;
  ..

Google analytics advanced segmentation, custom reporting and motion chart

support@joomlavue.com (Eddy) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:06:56 +0000

Google added a couple of new features to their free analytical tool late last month, a few of which are available by now : Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reporting and Motion Chart.

Advanced Segmentation

Advanced Segmentation is a tool you can use to slice and dice your Analytics data with great precision. Advanced segments allow you to choose what types of visits you want to be considered when generating the data for a report.
Source : Google

One of the most important report we expect from an analytical software is traffic sources, it gives us visualization of where our web traffic are coming from. In Google Analytics, there are 3 primary sources of traffic: organic (traffic generated from search engine), referal and direct traffic. And with Advanced Segmentation, extra infomation would be displayed with each subsequent metric and dimension filter. Here are a few screenshots from our analytical report:

4 segments of traffic sources

Google content removal

support@joomlavue.com (Eddy) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:06:17 +0000

There are times when we want part of our website to be excluded from Google Search result with reasons, such as when we are setting up a publicly accessible development site or demo site with lots of dummy contents. One way of doing that is to set up a disallow rule in robots.txt to the respective site or add a meta noindex tag to prevent googlebot or any searchbot from crawling those dummy contents.

However, as forgetful as some people are, just like me, when we haven't already put the disallow rule or noindex meta tag onto our sites, those diligent searchbots had already started crawling our sites at full speed. Here is the crawl stat of googlebot on this site over the past few weeks:

I have had 2 subdirectories of this site removed from Google Search listing recently, one of the sub-site was used to showcase my Joomla Jobboard Component which contains Joomla default sample contents and Jobboard Component dummy contents and another one was used to test Sweetcron Lifestream software, because many of its links are unnecessarily cluttering the Google Search result with not-so-worthy contents.

I used Google Webmaster to remove those 2 sub-sites, if you haven't got started using Google Webmaster yet, go do that, it's free and effective!

Once logged in, there are a few sections within the dashboard and since we're dealing with content removal, let's head to Tools » Remove URLs and the rest are self-explanatory.

Packaging Magento Theme

support@joomlavue.com (Eddy) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:10:52 +0000

So you've learnt how to create and customize Magento Theme or even have your custom-made theme ready to be shared with Magento Community? Before we go into details of packaging a theme, we should know a few basic terms and principles of Magento Extensions. Extensions could be of usage type of modules, language packs, design interfaces and themes and they are of 3 types of contributions:

Magento Core Extensions, these are extensions created by Magento Core Team and released under OSL 3.0 license.
Magento Community Extensions, these are extensions created by Magento Community Members and released under any open-source licenses.
Magento Commercial Extensions, these are extensions created by Commercial Third Party and released under their own licensing scheme and hosted under their own server.

Since we'll be sharing the theme with Magento Community, our extension is categorised into Community Extension. Every submitted and approved community extension will have an extension key which is used when users are installing it through "Magento Connect Manager". Let's take a popular blogging extension: Lazzymonks Blog as example, it has a key of "magento-community/Monk_Blog".

Joomla files includes

support@joomlavue.com (Eddy) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:47:24 +0000

Phpimpact blogged about files inclusion and dependencies of various open-source CMS and Frameworks such as Wordpress, MediaWiki, CodeIgniter and CakePHP. The inclusion and dependencies are presented in graphical output, which is useful to know which files depend on which in a clear visual representation.

As there wasn't any files dependency graph for Joomla yet, so I decide to generate one using Inclued extension and Graphviz program. The graph is generated from Joomla! 1.5.7, executing default frontpage controller with no modification.

Manual installation of magento modern theme

support@joomlavue.com (Eddy) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 14:58:09 +0000

Browsing the forum today, I found that there are quite a few threads of people asking how and where to download the modern theme manually. Since the modern theme from Magento Core is only available through Magento Connect as an extension, meaning that it must be installed through Magento Connect Manager by using the provided key, which will automatically download and install the extension.

That is pretty straighforward for most of us but some unfortunate users had been having issues with the automatic extension installation such as: short script execution time limited by their webhost and some unidentified script errors. So the other way of installing the theme would be manually downloading the theme files and put them into the magento theme folder. Here's how:

Joomla custom 404 page

support@joomlavue.com (Eddy) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 15:49:03 +0000

An article, The perfect 404 from A List Apart mentioned that a few must-haves for a 404 page includes:

A link to the site map (if you have one) and the home page.
A search box.
A distinctly minimalist look.

The default 404 page that Joomla provides is quite extensive but still we can add a few usable informations such as: search box (or a search link), sitemap (or a list of top links that we'd like users to browse).

Scribd API update

support@joomlavue.com (Eddy) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:12:03 +0000

I had a chance to test the Scribd API today. It was functioning great and with a complete documentation. The library used is Scribd PHP Client Library. But since the provided PHP Client Library is missing a few functions that are listed on the Scribd API page, I decided to add a few.

And so far, I have added 2 functions:

docs.getDownloadUrl

public function getDownloadUrl($doc_id, $doc_type = "original", $api_key, $api_sig = null, $session_key = null, $my_user_id = null){
	$method = "docs.getDownloadUrl";
	$params['doc_id'] = $doc_id;
	$params['doc_type'] = $doc_type;
	$params['api_key'] = $api_key;
	$params['api_sig'] = $api_sig;
	$params['session_key'] = $session_key;
	$params['my_user_id'] = $my_user_id;
	$result = $this->postRequest($method, $params);
	return $result['download_link'];
}