Native captcha for your form in Magento 1.7

Magento 1.7 came with a lot of changes and new features – one substantial module that was added by default is captcha. So, we would like to shed the light on this amazing feature. You know how many robots/spam bots browse the internet searching unprotected forms. Argh.. Therefore, if you have opened form for unregistered users you need to protect it with captcha to avoid spam attacks :)

There are many tools in Magento which allow you to view or generate and download different reports. So, we can conclude that Magento system has integrated tools for CSV and XML files generation. It might help in the situation when you need to generate a report for some feed or just export a list of structured data. We would like to demonstrate the small example that adds an ability to generate and download CSV files.
Let’s assume that you have already created your custom extension and wish to add a CSV export functionality. If it’s not the case and you can’t guess how to create an extension, then you can always find the light in our previous articles, for example this one. We called our extension Atwix_Tweaks so in the code examples below we will use this title.

Backend ACL rules

Many of you have used adminhtml.xml file to define menu items for a module in Magento backend. In this article we would like to highlight ACL features which allow us to fine-grant specific actions to be used by a privileged roles.

Filter products by attribute on a Magento CMS page

Ability to create pages with custom content is a great feature provided by Magento. You can easily create a new page for your store and add text, html, images, different widgets there. But sometimes people want to have something non-trivial on their pages. Usually it means that you need to operate some knowledge before you’ll get an appropriate result. In this article we would like to suggest you a simple solution on how to place a products list, prefiltered by some specific attribute, on your CMS page. The example below describes how to create a simple extension for this purpose.

Grid filter for columns with complex values

In previous articles we told you how to operate with columns in adminhtml grids. Usually the process is quite fast, for example, if you want to add simple column from the database. But sometimes you need to add a column with complex value, processed by renderer. You say: “it’s not a big deal to use renderers…” Right, until you face with sort and filter..