In addition to my Magento Community 1.7 and Enterprise 1.12 New Features Walkthrough: Magento also published a new User Guide for the Community 1.7 edition. You can now download it, free of charge from magento.com.

It looks like Magento has put great effort in this to make and completely updated the guide with new screenshots and information, and not just added info about the newly added features. With the 291 pages and 10,0 MB pdf file they are really living up to their promises that one day, we’ll be …

Just a simple blog post today, I’ve been asked a few times recently how to set the “bracketed (or stepped)” prices on a category/search page. Well normally Magento looks after itself when it comes to splitting the price brackets on these pages – however sometimes it’s best to specify ourselves how we want the prices [...]

We continue posting series of blog articles, dedicated to our clients and their businesses, operating on BelVG extensions. We strongly believe that success of any eCommerce development company is determined by the amount of profit, gained by store merchants. So we dig deeper to find out, whether our customers are satisfied, and then share their [...]

If you want to get your attribute options – whether it be from a  drop-down or multi-select attribute you can do so easily using the following code: The above will give you back an array of Labels and the attribute option ID. It’s really just a little snippet but is really useful, I’ve recently used it to [...]

Last month at the Magento Imagine conference in Las Vegas, new versions of the software were released: Community 1.7 and Enterprise 1.12. The Enterprise version contains 640 Fixes, 24 improvements/ changes and 15 new features. Information is a bit scarce on how the features work and where you can find/configure them, so here’s a review of all these new features that impact frontend and backend users.

Frontend

Mobile HTML5

The previous iPhone Theme was introduced back in in 2008, about time for an update! The new mobile interface features HTML5 support and supports iPhone, Android and Mobile Opera browsers.

To enable a mobile theme in Magento, you can check the post “

For any Magento developer or module maker you will find yourself consistently needing to load product collections for a variety of reasons. Whether you’re creating an AJAX search form, creating a back-end inventory module or simply showing a list of products on your homepage you will need to show and filter your products. Magento’s Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Product_Collection class [...]

Many stores require some additional information in the main navigation drop-down section. Displaying only subcategories might not always be enough and I noticed this is becoming a trend on shopping sites now days. Although there are many ways to accomplish this (including building you own custom module) I would like to show you a more clever way that will allow you to use static blocks and easily connect them with product categories. To better understand what I am talking about see the sample image of the end result below.

The idea

The general idea is to use static blocks because they are easily editable and can hold …

Here’s a screenshot of a fresh Magento Enterprise 1.12 installation. It’s paying a tribute to one of it’s founders…

Magento 1.12 login screen with CAPTCHA enabled

I swear no Photoshop, just 5 minutes of refreshing .

By the way, I’m working on a complete review of all Magento Enterprise 1.12 features (the above CAPTCHA is one of them), so stay tuned for that.

While developing web applications on localhost you must have always missed the functionality to send mails. As localhost does not support email service, so it has always been a bottleneck for email testing on localhost. But I have found a simple way to test emails on localhost using PHP. I have overridden the default mail() function of PHP to create a text/html file based on the email format. If the email is in html format, an HTML file is created otherwise a text file is created. You can see in this file what exactly is the content sent in your mail. See how does it work.

In my last project, during development of API extension for Mageboard application, when started to develope Apple Push Notifications Services integration, one problem came out that took me too much time each day to solve: Push notifications are supposed to be active only if some new order and/or customer is made on site.

So if there are no constant new orders and/or new customers, I can not test my APNS integration.

At first I started to enter orders and customers manually on dev server, but it took much time, so I decided to do something to solve it.
After some searching, i didn’t find the suitable extension to solve automatic creation of customers and orders …