You have to agree with me on this. How many times have you tried to find the answer for your Magento problems online and end up wasting your time and effort? How many times have you clicked through pages in Magento forums, find the solution that you need? And how many times you have been disappointed because the answer some people give online doesn’t work out for you?

I do. I do have these problems when I try to find solutions for Magento issues.

And I wish one day I could create a website in which right answer will always be in the top and is marked so I could save tons of time and effort in finding answers.

New Magento questions and answers site

Over the last week, I have been working really hard to create a new community for you and for me and today, I am so proud to announce with a new collaborative edited Q&A site for Magento at http://maghelpdesk.com. Here are the benefits I believe this community will bring to you:

• Search the answer for the question that you are looking for. In addition, you can also explore some related issues with our related search feature.
• Easily navigate through questions with categories and tags.
• Understand other related question with our related question feature.
• Our website auto ranks the answer in order of vote. So, the answer which received more vote will stay on the top, which helps you reduce time and effort browsing through other not-working solutions.
• People are able to choose the best answer so when it’s your turn to search for the answer, you know the correct solution right away.
• You can ask questions, FREE!
• You can earn points answering people questions. The point will show off how expert you are. Our website will feature experts on the homepage with their website and bio each month so you will get much chance to expose yourself with the community.
• And what else? You will have a good time, socialize with people who share the same interest as you do, make friends, have fun and many other benefits.

So, what you’re you waiting for. Ask your question about Magento now or help us answer one and get started.

P/S: Right now, I’m looking for contributor/editor for my website. If you feel you are interested in, please don’t hesitate to contact me at mike@magplazza.com and we can discuss it further.

Have a good time learning Magento and helping each other

Related posts:

1. Top free tools for deploying/developing Magento
2. Ultimate collection of fresh and free Magento themes

In this article I will show you quick tip that will help you solve common problems in Magento: “Can’t send header. Header already sent” in Magento.

My client’s store doesn’t have a root category and that’s the problem I need to solve. While I was emailing him back and forth, I discovered that his store was not there any more. Oops! When I asked, the client said he had added a new store and when he did something in the admin, the store gone as well as the admin backend.

Lesson that I learned and I think it’s also a good practice for you is always backup your data before you do any changes.

Quick tip for “Can’t send header. Header is already sent” in Magento

I got this error when I have managed to bring back the client store. Basically, this error happens when there is an extra space or character outside the the php tag <?php and ?>. Thanks to the help of excellent Magento users, I have been able to solve it. I think it will be useful if I explained steps by steps what I personally have done so that you can reference it later. When this error happens, you should try the following things.

• Open the file that has the problem. In my case, this file is index.php in the site root of Magento.
• Open the file with some text editors that supports the encoding. I prefer Notepad++ because its great support in multi languages as well as encoding.
• If you open it by Notepad++, click on the menu Encoding, click on UTF-8 without BOM. Save it and then re-upload it to the server.

We just save the error file in the UTF-8 encoding to make sure that everything extra space, line is wiped out. Encoding without BOM ensures you will not have any extra, unwanted characters in the file that prevent it from being executed properly.

Related posts:

1. Install or Upgrade your Magento store to 1.4.1.0? Here’s how to get it right!
2. How to manage and edit top links in your Magento store

“There has been an error processing your request. Exception printing is disabled by default for security reasons.”

What was wrong? I have spent nearly half an hour, prepared everything and now got caught by this error? The error wasn’t even kind enough to show me why it said that. So I spent an hour, dig through forum board, Internet and so on and I found some interested tips that I want to share with you today about my experience in installing and updating your Magento store to a newer version. Actually, this is the only time I hope this post will not be useful in the future because I hope Magento will fix it in the next version. Otherwise, you will need to stick with this post for a long long time

Quick fix for “There has been an error processing your request. Exception printing is disabled by default for security reasons.”

This fix is not mine. It was from the Magento community. However, I will post it right here so you won’t waste time clicking and reading people comments in the forum.

1. Step 1: Go to the folder where you install Magento, I will call it siteroot from now on. Go to siteroot/errors
2. Step 2: Change the file local.xml.sample to local.xml
3. Step 3: Go to your Magento store, hit Refresh (F5). You will see the error more clearly.

How to fix “Invalid argument supplied for foreach … toolbar.phtml”

Brightyoursite.com has a wonderful article on how to solve this issue. Please click here to solve your problem right away.

How to fix “SQLSTATE[42S02]: Base table or view not found: 1146 Table ‘awahq_mage.mage_sales_flat_order’ doesn’t exist” error

This error often comes up when you upgrade your Magento software or you have already loaded sample data and install Magento 1.4.1.0 from scratch. The best way to fix this problem will be:

1. Clean all the cache: Go to siteroot/var, delete everything except for .htaccess file.
2. Delete the database: Go to your phpMyAdmin, delete the whole database.
3. Then, install Magento from scratch again. Woo hoo! It works for me now! How’s about you?

The best way to upgrade Magento, people!

Through my experience, the best way to update your Magento software is INSTALL IT FROM SCRATCH. Yes, you hear me. Install everything from scratch and then, migrate old data to a new data and then switch to a new version. The benefit of this approach is:

• You can prevent any errors to your real store. In real world, error-free store makes money. Disrupt store kills your business!
• You can try everything with Magento 1.4 before you roll it out. You can try new themes, extensions and some new features in the new version without causing any harms and effects to the main store
• And the best of all, saving money and time dig through forum and help posts because of stupid Magento errors

Question, comments?

Hit me in the comment section below and I am more than willing to help.

Related posts:

1. How to install Magento into your local server properly in 5 minutes or less
2. What happned to me? Where are all of the posts?
3. Quick tip to solve “Can’t send header” in Magento

The part that I pay attention the most in these 3-day events are presentations about how to be a Magento theme designer, plug-in developer and how to clone yourself by sharing knowledge to fellowers. As you can see in their schedule, Yoav Kutner, the CTO of Magento will open the event and he will talk a bit about Magento history and some road map that Magento is following. This is such a great chance for any one to grab a chance to understand Magento culture and see how well Magento is going to adapt with current e-commerce right now.

So, pack your bag, grab a ticket to Spain, register online and begin your Magento journey. I hope you have fun and don’t forget to share your experience with me

No related posts.

As I have introduced in the blog post about how to add a Facbook fan box to your sidebar, Magento theme is built around three building blocks: layout, templates and blocks. The same theory also applies here, the layout decides which links show up and template file just render them out to the screen.

Now, go ahead and open the template file header.phtml in app/design/frontend/default/yourtheme/template/page/html for a quick inspection, you will see this line of code

<?php echo $this->getWelcome()?> | <?php echo $this->getChildHtml('topLinks') ?>

As you can see, this code line “echo” (outputs to the screen) the function that gets the welcome message and top links. Our main task right now is to find those top links that this template prints out.

Let’s open the file app/design/frontend/default/yourtheme/layout/customer.xml. Look at the first few lines of the layout:

 <default>
        <!-- Mage_Customer -->
        <reference name="top.links">
             <action method="addLink" translate="label title" module="customer"><label>My Account</label><url helper="customer/getAccountUrl"/><title>My Account</title><prepare/><urlParams/><position>10</position></action>
        </reference>
    </default>

Now, go ahead and put “<!––” in front of <action (without quotation mark) and “––>” after the </action>. Save the file and upload it into the server. You’ll notice the change.

What we just did?

We just comment out the code block to display the My Account link on the top of your Magento store. What this code does is add a link into the child html of this template, label it My Account and assign the href attribute of it to customer/customerurl. And then the template will take care of the rest. It’s so interesting, isn’t it?

If you look further down, you will see 3 more code blocks that add Login/Logout links on the top. Go ahead and comment out these code blocks using the same method if you want.

Besides My Account/Login/Logout links, you can:

• Disable My cart link by opening the file checkout.xml in the same folder with customer.xml
• Disable Wishlist link by opening the file wishlist.xml

How can you add your own link to the top links

There are cases you don’t want to disable the top links but add some links to it, like links to your season sale store, etc. Well, that’s easy. Just open the header.phtml above and next to the code that display the top links

<?php echo $this->getWelcome()?> | <?php echo $this->getChildHtml('topLinks') ?>

You just add your own link. In this example, I will do it like this

<?php echo $this->getWelcome()?> | <?php echo $this->getChildHtml('topLinks') ?> | <a href="mystore.com/seasonsale" title="My seasonal sale store">50% OFF COLORFUL SWIM SUIT</a>

That’s simple, right? You see, Magento isn’t such that hard

Wrap up

Top links are important because when your menu bar is full of categories, you’ll need it as the secondary navigation bar for your pages so that customers can browse easily. Add new links and disable default links on Magento is not too hard, as I have demonstrated in this tutorial. I hope you find it helpful and please comment if there’s something wrong. Thanks!

Related posts:

1. How to add a Facebook fan box to your Magento store sidebar
2. How to disable drop down menu in Magento
3. Top Magento extensions that are extremely useful for every store owner (Part 1)

Tip 1: Make sure your username and password is secured

First of, you always need to make sure that your username and password is strong enough. For username, don’t use words such as “admin”, “administrator”, your store name or your name because those words are predictable and can be guessed. You can make the job of those who want to hack into your dashboard harder if you set the strong username. For password, use the combination of letters, capital letters, special characters and numbers to make your own password. When I need to create a secured password, I always look around my room, find something that I can use as a password. For example, I see my hard drive and I can make a password like BlAckH@rdDrive@#56. Pretty strong, isn’t it! This way, your password is very hard to predict, not to mentioning the strength of it. The downside is you need to remember it. It’s pretty painful, right? I know it.

Here’s another tip for you. If you find your password is extremely difficult to remember, you can use a password manager to manage it and other passwords. Personally, I used LastPass to manage all of my passwords and the software keeps me pretty organized and secured until now. I avoid writing the password down to a paper or a note because I often clean up my desk and I may accidentally throw it to a garbage bin. LastPass is totally FREE for life and you can download it here!

How to change your admin account username and password?

• Log into your admin account, go to System -> Account and change the account information.

Tip 2: Change the location where you login

By default, you need to access to yourdoman.com/admin to log into you admin dashboard.  It’s pretty straight forward but it’s also a downfall. Hackers already know where you log in so what they need to do next is just figure out your user name and password. Why don’t we make their job harder and they really need to “arghhh!” in order to get us. It’s easy! You need to change the location where you log in.

How to?

1. Go to your dashboard, navigate to System -> Configuration. Look at your left, click on Admin
2. Click on Admin Base URL. Change Use custom admin URL to Yes
3. Type in Custom admin URL something, like mystoredashboard/. Remember to add slash at the end of your URL.

Tip 3: Remove secret key from your URL

Secret key is the unique key for each session you log into Magento backend. Unlike encryption key which is given to you when you install Magento, secret key is more like a way to manage who log into your dashboard and what time does he log in. That basically what secret key is. You need to hide your secret key from your URL because you don’t want to give people information about your login mechanism and gain insightful data in your store log.

How to?

1. On the same page where you set up your custom admin URL, click on Security
2. Choose No at Add Secret Key to URLs.

Tip 4: Use SSL to secure your log in path

Secured socket layer (SSL) is available at your web hosting and you can order through them. SSL makes sure 3rd party can’t access to your data while it is transferring between the client computer and the server. So if your store has SSL, your login information can’t be viewed on the way it is sent from your computer to server and reverse. It pretty helps to secure your log in as well as ensuring your customers that their credit card number and their data are safe with you.

How to?

1. On your Magento backend, navigate to System -> Configuration. Look on your left, click on Web
2. Click on Secure tab, type in your secure URL such as https://yourstore.com
3. Choose Yes in the box Use Secure URLs in Admin

What we have achieved so far?

So far, I have walked you through top 4 tips in securing your Magento store today. I hope you enjoy my article and have a great sunny day! (It’s very sunny now in Pullman and I really enjoy it)

Related posts:

1. Quick tip to solve “Can’t send header” in Magento
2. Top Magento extensions that are extremely useful for every store owner (Part 1)
3. Things that I have updated when I move to new blog – How to move your blog to a new domain?

What is “Saved credit card”

Saved credit card payment method enables you to charge customers offline using your counter-top machine or your preferred methods. It is safe payment method because customers need to enter all of the valid information about the credit card such as name on card, card number, expiration date and 3-digit security number. When customers next to move to the next step, this payment method will automatically verify all of the information for you and will prevent customers enter fake credit card number.

Typical counter-top machine

When you can use it

If you don’t have a payment gateway set up, you can use this method to charge customers offline, as I said above. You can use saved credit card payment method in those countries who don’t accept Paypal check out or Google check out. It all depends on you, your store location and your convenient preferences.

Saved credit card options

• Enabled: Turn on or turn off this payment method when customers check out.
• Title: The title of this payment method in check out process. If your store is from another country then you may want to localize the title in this box.
• New order status: Set status of orders which are paid by this method. So in the above picture, I have set status of orders placed by this payment method to Pending so I can distinguish them and orders placed by other methods.
• Credit card verification: If you turn this option off, verification number will not be asked. Otherwise, customers need to enter 3-digit verification number when check out.
• Payment from applicable countries: Set whether you allow all customers in different countries to use this payment method or not.
• Payment from specific countries: If you don’t choose All countries in the above section then you must specify which countries you accept this payment method.
• Minimum order total and Maximum order total: Set order total range that customers must have to check out using saved credit card.
• Sort order: If you have many payment methods set up, you can specify the order of this method in check out process.

Do I miss any other information? I hope you find this article helpful and have a great weekend!

Related posts:

1. Introduction to Magento Payment Gateway
2. 28+ free and very essential e-commerce, payment, checkout and sale icons for your store
3. How to set up USPS Shipping for your Magento stores

1. One page check out process

Every store owner who is familiar with e-commerce must know a fact that you can increase the sale conversion up to 200% if you reduce the number of steps that customers need to go through to check out items. Studies have shown that cart abandonment during the multi-step check out process are particular high. This is due to those following reasons:

• Customers change the mind during the process.
• Customers feel frustrated about the information being asked.
• Customers don’t have time/effort to enter required information
• Customers feel lost during the process, don’t know where to go back to change quantities/add more items.

That are the reasons why big e-commerce sites such as Amazon and Ebay is trying to reduce multi-step check out by automatically fill in information and using checkout phrase, which when you enter in, it will take you to the final step.

Magento community edition has packed with a good standard check out progress. That’s because Magento allows customers to check out as guest, avoiding registering an account and boost the time of checking out items. However, that alone is not enough. You will need to have the one page check out process for the reasons that I have discussed above.

Typical extension in this category:

• Onestepcheckout extension: This extension is really cool and when you look at it at the first time, I’m pretty sure you will say “This is what I need. This is what is going to solve your problem.” The extension replaces the whole check out process on Magento. When you click the checkout process, there are 4 easy steps that you need to do and there can’t be any confusion or frustration at all. Everything is clear and stand out, to instruct customers what to do. Price: €190 Buy it now | Demo store (These links will open in a new window)
• Magento Simple checkout extension: Instead of aligning steps into columns and marking the order of those steps, this plug in simply lists everything in horizontal order that customers need to do. The pros of this plug in are customers can change quantities, delete items on check out process. The cons are extension is too simple. In addition, it doesn’t show the integration with shipping module and auto update if customers change shipping method. In addition, it misses the administrative options so you can’t tweak things with this extension. Price: $89.00 Website | Demo store (These links will open in a new window)

2. Best seller products extension

Best seller products boosts more sale toward your store because customers can see what items are popular the most.

Typical extension in this category:

• Best seller extension from Mage-world: This extension let you display your best seller products in various mode such as slider, side bar block, etc. It’s actually very nice. Price: $25.00. Demo store | Visit website

3. Live chat extension

What will distinguish you, make your store stand out from other stores which are selling the same product? To me, the answer will be support. Excellent support will make the customers love and remember your store, simply because they are so impressive with your kindness in helping them out.

Typical extensions in this category

• MagentoLivechat: This plug in will provide a nice block on your side bar to let your customers chat with you while you are sitting at the back end and typing hardly. The extension supports multiple sessions so you can chat with many customers at the same time. Especially, it’s FREE! Demo video | Download this extension
• YALC (Yet another live chat): Shhh! This is Magento version. It’s not like Yet Another Related post of WordPress I’m just kidding. This extension supports the latest release of Magento and it opens a chat session in another browser window so customers still be able to shop while talking. Price: FREE! Visit website

What else do I miss?

What other extensions do you think they will be extremely useful to store owner? Please comment and I will include them in the next round up. Thanks

Related posts:

1. Introduction to Magento Payment Gateway
2. Top 4 security tips for your Magento store that can be done easily
3. 3 business types that you can use Magento for

I have been on Ebay for several years and tried to make some money on Ebay to see how profitable this model is. Soon I found something wrong with what I was doing back then. I was a small seller and did not have much inventories on hand to make a profit. Surely, I went on, tried to buy some bulk items from wholesaler but I did not have enough money. As I said, I was a small seller with just couple bucks in my hand. Drop shipping solves this problem.

Drop shipping allows you to choose products from several wholesalers and sell them on your online store. I did not take part in this program because I quit being a professional eBay seller already but basically, you join in a drop shipping network and pay some amount of money for monthly fees. Then, you choose products and begin to sell them. When your products are sold, the wholesaler will ship it an you pay for the items wholesaling price and keep the profit.

That’s off topic for a little. What Magento can do for this type of business?

I have seen a lot of sellers set up Magento for their drop shipping store, take some free themes that I have mentioned in the previous post and make quite a profit from it. The power of Magento is it helps you promote your product online by handling an excellent SEO job for your product listing page. Besides that, it helps you keep track of every sale, keep contact with the customers so they can come back to your store more often. In addition, Magento’s ability to set up multiple store in case you have seasonal items make it a perfect platform for drop shipping business.

Use Magento for your online store

Have you heard a book of Smashing Magazine? If you do, then you have to know the fact that Smashing Magazine use Magento to let customers buy their book and they utilize Magento to keep track of their sale in the zero-cost way.

If you hesitate because of the rumor that Magento is hard to set up than other e-commerce shopping cart software then you have to remove that thought out, completely from your mind.

In fact, Magento is quite easy to set up and familiar with. With one day working, you can make a functioning e-commerce store for your own crafts and products with Magento.

Setting up payment and shipping also easy. I have guided you how to set up payment and shipping in Magento store so be sure to check those tutorials out.

What’s else do you need? If you need more functioning, tweaking, check out the extensions for Magento. In some next post, I will show you tips you can upgrade your small store to an enterprise-class store such as Sony, Walmart and so on. Stay tune!

Use Magento to sell digital product (ebook, etc)

I have seen some bloggers, designers and coders are taking too much effort in trying to sell their digital products. They can be masters and experts in designing a WordPress theme, a custom script, a stunning online ebook but they are wasting money and time into third-party e-commerce system.

What best about Magento is it allows you to sell downloadable products online and incorporates your store with your WordPress blog!

You don’t sell one time and go. You want to establish long-term business relationship with your customers. That’s how firms, businesses are making money. You too! You can’t base on third-party e-commerce solution to manage the sale for you. You need to set up your own store and taking care of business by your own and Magento will let you do that.

Related posts:

1. Ebay presents new stop for you to shopping all of your fashion things
2. Top Magento extensions that are extremely useful for every store owner (Part 1)
3. Introduction to Magento Payment Gateway

What would you get with this deal?

Normally, to subscribe to their club premium membership, you need to pay $299.00 plus monthly fee. Monthly fee is $30. That’s quite expensive and some people can’t handle that. I also wanted to purchase their club membership for a long time ago but due to the high price, that desire needed to go away.

However, they are offering a LIMITED TIME deal right now. Guess what? They are offering club premium member ship for just $49.95 and 3 first months free. And as they said, you can:

The Annual HelloThemes Premium Club offers you a chance to grab all our 20+ Magento Themes and extensions! This membership includes full support and complete access to our photoshop files (PSD), PLUS access to any new themes released during the course of your membership subscription.

(If you stop your subscription you will STILL get all my past/current themes!)

CLICK HERE TO GET ACCESS TO THIS DEAL

A single theme costs about $79.00. But today, by paying $49.95, you are taking all of 20 themes plus 7 EXTRA BONUS GIFTS RIGHT HERE

* Bonus 1: Advanced SEO Techniques (Currently Selling at $27)
* Bonus 2: Maximum Profits, Private Label Rights (Currently Selling at $27)
* Bonus 3: Become An Affiliate Marketing Master (Currently Selling at $27)
* Bonus 4: Viral Traffic Generation (Currently Selling at $27)
* Bonus 5: Dominate The Web 2.0 Market (Currently Selling at $27)
* Bonus 6: Super Joint Venture Secrets (Currently Selling at $27)
* Bonus 7: Blogging For Cash (Currently Selling at $2

This offer is going to expire on Thursday, January 24th so you need to hurry up!

A quick look at what you will get

These themes are astonishing, beautiful and customer-central design. Themes are in wide range of categories and will fit in every business that you have. Their themes demo are here if you want to go and see them yourself.

What a best deal that HelloThemes is offering right now! $49.95 for 20 themes and 7 EXTRA Marketing BONUS FREE. However, beware because this offer is going away on Thursday June 24th. ACT NOW! Grab your chance! This is the only chance you will get! (I already secured mine! Thank you for your generous, HelloThemes)

This offer is going to expire on Thursday, January 24th so you need to hurry up!

Related posts:

1. Ultimate collection of fresh and free Magento themes