Meet Magento Poland 2012. Our experience.

Last weekend was highlighted by a first Meet Magento event in Poland and four of our Atwix team ninjas were sent there. Here is our report from the field…

Email sending feature in the custom module

In our new article we would like to discuss how to make your own sending email feature for the module. Pretty often we need to have ability that allows us to notify customers or admins about some events, so it’s very important part of the module development. Moreover, as you may notice Magento has native email functionality which makes developer’s life simpler.

Adding a button to the system configuration of Magento

If you recently started to learn Magento and presently develop own Magento extensions, one day you will face with Admin’s System Configuration section. This is a place where you can store some settings for your module. There are many tutorials on the web, explaining how to set up different form elements in System Configuration. This article shows how to add a button.

Observers reality or fiction

Observers are very powerful instrument in Magento. They allow us to bind our functionality to some Magento events. Many of you know about dispatchEvent function. This function calls all observers registered for this event. For example, we have the following code snippet placed in this app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model/Resource/Product/Collection.php file.

Using Mage Run tool to speed up development

When starting Magento development, first thing you find out that in order to see the changes you have to clear the cache. There is also an option to disable the cache completely, but performance wise – it’s not a very smart move. As your experience on the system grows you are getting to know which exact cache to clear to see the changes, be it config, layout, FPC cache or any other. Nevertheless, these operations are pretty cumbersome as admin session times out from time to time. You may also know that enabling template hints is not a quick operation either.