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.

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..

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.

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.

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.

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.

Often there are situations where customer has some issues while placing orders or making operations from the “My Account” section. At that point, an ability for admin to login as a customer and see what is wrong becomes very useful.

I think everyone who is interested in ecommerce development get familiar with Magento earlier or later. It’s a very popular platform, where a lot of modern programming technologies are used. Since Magento is one of the most powerful and flexible shopping cart engines, it requires a deep level of expertise to develop extensions or even do some basic changes. So we’ve decided to share our tips for Magento Developers in this article. [Continue to Part 2]

In most Magento templates, we can see the language selector provided as a simple pull down menu. Let’s explore a way to enhance the look and make a more attractive, custom style.
In the example below, I’ll tell you how to make a multilingual store and replace the standard language selector with flag icons.

Magento is a relatively intelligent system. It implements an Event/Observer pattern for end users to hook into. You can catch different events and process them with your logic after. For example, if you want to perform an action after a user was logged in, you can use customer_login event, for an action implementation after the event.