Just as we are ready to go live on one of my client’s web site, we started to test the tax rules just to make sure that taxes would apply properly.  To our surprise, it DIDN’T!

After verifying the tax classes and customer groups, I got lucky by noticing that for some odd reason, all of my products had their tax class set to NONE instead of TAXABLE GOODS, WTF!! Since there were over 3000 products, I figure using the admin page to do a bulk update of the attribute will one way or another just time out.

After some digging, I have found a way to directly modify the tax class field in phpmyadmin, below is the script that I used to make this sweeping change.  Seems to work, but just make sure a backup is done before running this:

UPDATE `catalog_product_entity_int` SET `value` = ‘2′ WHERE `catalog_product_entity_int`.`attribute_id` =81;

Attribute_ID 81 is the tax class flag for the products. Whereas value of 2 indicates “Taxable Goods”, if you want to set as downloadable goods, this is set to “4″

blog posting, magento magento, tax class, taxable goods

Searched high and low for a way to add gift-wrap service, and came across an excellent solution on the Magento forum. Here’s the link:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/176424/P0/

blog posting, magento, wordpress gift wrap, magento

Had a need to increase pricing for ALL products in the Magento store by $5.00, below is the script that I ran directly in phpadmin that takes care of this:

UPDATE catalog_product_entity_decimal val
SET  val.value = (val.value + 5)
where val.attribute_id=’60′

Where 5 is the price increase, so you can adjust that number accordingly.

blog posting batch, magento, phpadmin, update pricing

NopCommerce (www.nopcommerce.com) is the closest thing to Magento except that it runs on Microsoft’s .NET instead of the LAMP stack.  It’s still a long way to go for NOP to catch up with where Magento is at, but if you have used Magento, you will see A LOT of similarities in NOP, as I have a feeling that the developer behind NOP based its implementation off of Magento.  NOP will be strictly for the developers using Microsoft Technology (C#, ASP.NET, MS SQL 2005, IIS), if you can go either way, PHP or .NET, I suggest you go with Magento, simply because it’s more mature and has a whole lot of plugins ready for use.

That being said, the reason why I built CarGear.com using NOPCommerce, is specifically for the reason mentioned above, I needed to build this project using Microsoft technology simply because my technical resources for this project is more versed in .NET than PHP.  A secondary reason would be the fact that since NOP is less mature, it has a more raw framework to build stuff on top of it.

CarGear.com sells auto parts, collision replacement parts, and everything else you can think of that deals with cars.

All feedback welcomed.

blog posting, e-commerce, evaluation cargear.com, NOP Commerce

One of the marketing strategy employed by many e-commerce sits is to provide product feeds (RSS) to have them be displayed in an affiliate or partner blog or content-driven web sites.  I’ve recently came across this need to do just that and what I have found is that the default Magento RSS feed is clunky and display the entire product description as part of the feed items.  The way to customize the output is go to into the following file (NOTE: this workaround requires modify Magento core file, which may become a hassle and you update your Magento installation):

\app\code\core\Mage\Rss\Block\Catalog\

under the above folder, you will see different files (category.php, new.php, tag.php, etc.) each file controls the output of each type of RSS feed Magento has built in by default. So if you want to modify the RSS feed format for your products in a certain category you would modify the category.php file. For me, i was looking at syndicating my new products, so I modified new.php file.

When opening up the new.php file, scroll down to approximately line 99-104, under the public function addNewItemXmlCallback($args) is where the RSS feed content is formatted, so you can simply move around the html table and or select to replace the product description with the short description, etc.  For me, I simply removed the long description and kept the pricing, product image and the product title. Below is my revised output code snippet:

$description = ‘<table><tr>’.
‘<td><a href=”‘.$product->getProductUrl().’”><img src=”‘. $this->helper(’catalog/image’)->init($product, ‘thumbnail’)->resize(75, 75) .’” border=”0″ align=”left” height=”75″ width=”75″></a><br>Price:’.Mage::helper(’core’)->currency($product->getPrice()).
($product->getPrice() != $final_price  ? ‘ Special Price:’. Mage::helper(’core’)->currency($final_price) : ”).
‘</td>’.
‘</tr></table>’;

and the output looks like the following when it gets syndicated to a content driven site, you see the RSS feed of the products at the right side of the screen:

http://links.chosen29.com - this is a PLIGG-driven bookmarking web site similar to Digg.com

The RSS feed from Magento is fed through Google’s Feedburner and then syndicated thereafter, primarily for the purpose of better exposure and trackability.

Lastly, here’s a shameless plug, please visit my new web site at Chosen29.com

blog posting, e-commerce, magento chosen29.com, magento notes

This is a simple yet practical fix that, for some reason, Magento never got around to enabling upto Magento Version 1.3.2.3.

Basically by default the Magento registration form only requires you to enter First Name, Last Name, Email and VAT/Tax Number, but that in a real world scenario is not practical and not enough for business owners to follow up on.  Base on looking into the code here: app/design/frontend/default/blue/template/customer/form/register.phtml, we know Magento has every intention of adding additional fields, just they haven’t been enabled.

By following the fix here, you can reveal the additional fields. Essentially you just have to comment out a IF-Then statement to reveal the proper form fields. Below is the result:

blog posting, magento, technical notes address, company name, fields, magento, registration form

We are selling our e-commerce web site: www.tickon.com.

Why are we selling? Becuase we have more projects to work on, and we simply don’t have time to operate the business side of the e-commerce site, and that includes marketing the site, fulfilling orders, finding new products, and most importantly — providing excellent customer service.

How much are you selling for? Make your best offer and we will consider every bid.  We just want the site to be in good hands; someone willing to put in the effort to market the site.

What’s included? We will include the domain name, help you move to your desired web hosting company? or we will host it for you for a small monthly fee. You will also have the code (the site runs on Magento 1.2.1), and the existing database, and you will be hooked up with the product supplier for future order fulfilment (they are a great supplier to work with!!).

For more information email me at jerry at casualcommerce dot com

blog posting, e-commerce, magento e-commerce, for sale, magento, tickon.com

Look around on the net and search for a digg-like software to create a social voting news platform, you will most likely find Pligg as the popular choice of open source software that does pretty much what Digg.com does.

After evaluting the platform, I find the platform easy to implement, with one catch being that at its current state, you can’t install it locally or even on a production server under a virtual directory.  For example you will not be able to install it under http://www.52my.info/digg, instead you will need to install it at the root of its own domain, so here’s my site: http://news.52my.info

Obviously, I have localised it for Chinese audience..and the back-end admin have made in-line translation easy and the use of smarty template made customizing easy (I stuck with the wistie default template, as I found it to be good enough).

Enjoy.

blog posting, evaluation, recommendations clone, digg, news.52my.info, pligg

For the most part, I have used WAMP on Windows XP for development and used Simple Helix for magento hosting; they really do make Magento run fast on their server.

Recently working on a project in which the client wants to host the web site themselves, but by default, the LAMP implementation is totally not optimized for Magento.

Did some research and came across this post filled with performance tuning tips..althought i haven’t tried them, but I believe the tips are worth a try if you are hosting your own magento installation.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/36225/

blog posting magento, performance tuning

Not sure if it’s just me.  But for every Magento development done, whenever I upload my code to the production server, the code would run fine, but when it comes to installing extensions using Magento Connect, it would never properly install the extensions (even though it claims that it has successfully installed the ext.).

The problem appears to be an issue with the “Downloader” folder not being writeable in the production environment; this makes perfect sense from security perspective, but there just needs to be better documentation on how to best setup the site so that Magento Connect works as advertised.

I googled and came across the following post: https://www.gigapros.com/support/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=164, the long and short of is is simply to make Magento fully writeable (777) when you run the Magento Connect, and then reset the permissions after the extension has been installed….it’s a somewhat satisfactory workaround i guess.

Here’s how to do this thru your SSH client. Log in to your SSH account and then execute the following commands:

1. cd <your_magento_folder_path>
2. find . -type d -exec chmod 777 {} \;
3. chmod 666 downloader/config.ini

You should now be able to access the Magento Connect Manager. When you have finished the installation/upgrade, you should reset the permissions by executing the following SSH commands:

1. find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
2. find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
3. chmod o+w var media app/etc/use_cache.ser

blog posting 777, magento, Magento Connect, permission