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…

We continue to share our experience with Magento developers by publishing the next set of Best Practices in Magento coding. If you missed our previous article, here it is.

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.

Hello dear friends. While working with Magento, many of you may have noticed that, when you manage products in the admin you need to see how the product looks on the frontend. Of course, you can open a new page, then open frontend search or write direct url address to this product page, as Magento does not have the button or direct link from the admin page to the frontend product page, but it is not very simple way. Let’s create module with this feature.

Pretty often we face a task, where we need to add a custom column to the customers/orders grid in Magento admin. The solution is simple and if you google for it, you will get tons of solutions. However, pretty much all of them describe the same way, which isn’t always proper.

In this article we would like to cover a topic about a neat feature of admin forms, that will make management of your module’s data by store staff more convenient.

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.

The product page is one of the most important parts of your store. That’s why so much attention is paid to make this page look perfect.

Read also: Resource model for Magento product flat tables.

Tabs is a good way to display a lot of data inside a compact block. It helps to avoid huge scroll bars and also looks much nicer on portable devices. You can find tons of Magento templates with tabs on the product view page and we are going to tell you the easiest way to add them there. All examples are applicable to the default Magento theme, but with practice you can use following methods to customize your own theme.

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.

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.