Magento: Administration for Beginners

Someone asked me today how they can quickly come up to speed on Magento Administration. They said everything seems so overwhelming to manage. I recommend the Magento Beginner’s Guide book shown here in this post.

Amazon has this to say about this book: “Magento is the world’s most evolved e-commerce solution. It runs on the Apache/MySQL/PHP platform. From one installation, you can control multiple storefronts, all sharing customer and product information. Magento’s templates and themes enable you to customize the look and feel of your store, even optimizing it for mobile phones. Extensions enable you to connect Magento to a large number of payment gateways and shipping services. Modular code enables you to upgrade your Magento installation while retaining your customizations. Support is provided free by an active open source community and by subscription to Varien, the company behind Magento.

Magento is one of the most exciting, flexible, and customizable e-commerce systems. It offers you an extensive suite of powerful tools for creating and managing an online store. As your online store grows, you can be sure that this robust e-commerce system can handle your needs. However, getting started with Magento can be difficult without the right guidance.

This book provides that guidance in the form of a step-by-step approach to building a simple, effective online store. The book covers the key features of Magento that will help you get your store up and running. It guides you through installation, configuration, populating your store with products, accepting payments, maintaining relationships with your customers, and fulfilling orders.

When you create an online store with Magento, you usually follow a defined series of steps. This book is arranged to support that process. Each chapter shows you how to get the most from one step.

You will learn to customize the default Magento storefront so that it becomes your store and also about Magento’s directory structure and where some of the elements of a store are customized. This experience will help you if you decide to go beyond this book and install new themes or create your own themes.

As you work your way through each chapter, your store will grow in scope and sophistication. By the time you finish this book, you should have a basic but complete, working online store.”

I hope this book helps you get rolling with your own Magento Administration too!

Magento: Dynamic SKU display on Configurable Products

A client of mine requested that on a configurable product when a visitor chooses an option (i.e. a simple product) that I display that simple products SKU automatically on the configurable product page.

First thing I did was look at the Simple Configurable Product module by Matt Dean to see if that was an option I could toggle on. Unfortunately that was not an option. I have a feeling that is not an option because some configurable products may require multiple options to be selected in order to present the correct SKU and the code for that could be potentially daunting. Fortunate for me, my client only has one dropdown per configurable product.

To get things going on this little project I opened up app/design/frontend/base/default/template/catalog/product/view/type/options/configurable.phtml and used that page for writing my code. You may want to choose a different directory that is related you your site’s theme.

On about line 38 I changed it from this:

<select name="super_attribute[<?php echo $_attribute->getAttributeId() ?>]"
id="attribute<?php echo $_attribute->getAttributeId() ?>">

to this:

<select name="super_attribute[<?php echo $_attribute->getAttributeId() ?>]"
id="attribute<?php echo $_attribute->getAttributeId() ?>"
onchange="return changeSku(this);">

At the very bottom of the configurable.phtml page I wrote the following mix of PHP and Prototype code to solve the Dynamic SKU Display:

<?php
$_product    = $this->getProduct();
$_attributes = Mage::helper('core')->decorateArray($this->getAllowAttributes());
?>
<?php if ($_product->isSaleable() && count($_attributes)):?>
    <dl>
    <?php foreach($_attributes as $_attribute): ?>
        <dt><label class="required"><em>*</em><?php echo $_attribute->getLabel() ?></label></dt>
        <dd<?php if ($_attribute->decoratedIsLast){?> class="last"<?php }?>>
            <div class="input-box">
                <select name="super_attribute[<?php echo $_attribute->getAttributeId() ?>]" id="attribute<?php echo $_attribute->getAttributeId() ?>" class="required-entry super-attribute-select" onchange="return changeSku(this);">
                    <option><?php echo $this->__('Choose an Option...') ?></option>
                  </select>
              </div>
        </dd>
    <?php endforeach; ?>
    </dl>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        var spConfig = new Product.Config(<?php echo $this->getJsonConfig() ?>);
    </script>

<?php endif;?>

<?php
$conf = Mage::getModel('catalog/product_type_configurable')->setProduct($_product);
$col = $conf->getUsedProductCollection()->addAttributeToSelect('*')->addFilterByRequiredOptions();

echo '<script type="text/javascript">';

echo '
document.observe("dom:loaded", function() {
  $("sku-container").update("<strong>Product Id: </strong> Select an option to display Product Id");
});
';
echo ' function changeSku(sel){';     	

$itemId = array();
foreach($col as $simple_product){
$itemId[] = array($simple_product->getSelectLabel() => $simple_product->getSku());
} 

//echo "<pre>";
//print_r($itemId);
//echo "</pre>";

foreach($itemId as $val){
 foreach($val as $k => $v){
echo "\n".'if(sel.options[sel.selectedIndex].value == "'.$k.'"){'."\n";
echo '$("sku-container").update("<strong>Product Id: </strong>'.$v.'");'. "\n";
echo '}';
	}
}

echo "\n".'if(sel.options[sel.selectedIndex].value == ""){'."\n";
echo '$("sku-container").update("<strong>Product Id: </strong> Select an option to display Product Id");'. "\n";
echo '}'; 

echo "}";
echo "\n</script>";
?>

Please note that my client requested that the SKU not be shown for the configurable product itself so you will need to comment out and/or remove those areas of the code shown above that do not display the SKU for the configurable product.

If you have a questions or comments please reply to this post and I would be happy to discuss it with you.

Magento: IE8 adds wrong quantity to cart

Ran into a bug issued by a client where some of his customers reported that IE8 adds the wrong product quantity to the shopping cart.

After doing a little Googling I found that this resolves the issue for IE8 users:

Open the template yourdesign/template/catalog/product/view/addToCart.phtml

and replace
<input … onclick=”productAddToCartForm.submit()” type=”text” />

with

<input … onclick=”productAddToCartForm.submit(); return false;” type=”text” />

Magento: Category Products Sort Position

If you want to manually sort products in your category for any reason, assign numbers to each product, under the Category Products tab of your category, in order of your desired sort order and then go to the Category Display Settings Tab and uncheck the check box under Available Product Listing Sort By and then select “Best Value”.

Your products will now sort correctly using the position numbers you specified.

Magento: Tax Rules set, but customer not charged tax

This morning I received a job to troubleshoot why a customer was not charged sales tax even though the customer lived in the zip code that the Tax Rule was set for. My first inclination was that perhaps his billing address was different from his shipping address and that the rule applied to his shipping address and not his billing address. That was not the case though.

After closer examination I realized the customer inputted a ZIP+4 (XXXXX-XXXX) style US Zip Code. When I looked at the Tax Rules they were all written like this:

“US-FL-32304-Rate 1,US,FL,32304,7.5,”

In order to fix the issue I created a wildcarded rule for every Tax Rule set that looks like this:

“US-FL-32304-*-Rate 1,US,FL,32304-*,7.5,”

Special thanks to my new buddy <Groenleer> on #magento (freenodes) for helping me troubleshoot this!!!

Client says “proceed to checkout” empties cart and returns to homepage

A customer would come to the website, place items in their shopping cart, and then click the “proceed to checkout button” from the shopping cart. Rather than take them to the cart, our Magento website would immediately forward them to the home page and empty all the items from their cart.

Cause: ISPs like AOL, Comcast, and Shaw.ca use a technique of changing IP addresses that cause security settings in Magento to empty the cart and not allow people to check out.

Fix: Change the Session Validation settings in the Magento Admin, found under System > Configurations > Web, to ‘no’ on everything except “Validate HTTP_USER_AGENT.” After doing this, go to System > Cache Management and refresh the configuration cache to apply the changes.