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″

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

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.

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.

\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

Funny thing is that the fix to include the Address field isn’t straightforward and NOBODY ran into this problem, as there were no postings on Magento forum nor google search…I was surprised.  Anyways, what happens when users click on “Export to CSV” is essentially what you see in the grid below it is what gets exported, so the fix is to include the Address field in grid.  The file to modify is a core file, so you would have to update this when you do a Magento upgrade. Here’s the path to the file:

app/code/core/Mage/Adminhtml/Block/Customer/grid.php

Near line 45 you will find the below block of code, you will add the line that is in bold:

protected function _prepareCollection()
{
$collection = Mage::getResourceModel(’customer/customer_collection’)
->addNameToSelect()
->addAttributeToSelect(’email’)
->addAttributeToSelect(’created_at’)
->addAttributeToSelect(’group_id’)
->joinAttribute(’billing_street’, ‘customer_address/street’, ‘default_billing’, null, ‘left’)
->joinAttribute(’billing_postcode’, ‘customer_address/postcode’, ‘default_billing’, null, ‘left’)
->joinAttribute(’billing_city’, ‘customer_address/city’, ‘default_billing’, null, ‘left’)
->joinAttribute(’billing_telephone’, ‘customer_address/telephone’, ‘default_billing’, null, ‘left’)
->joinAttribute(’billing_region’, ‘customer_address/region’, ‘default_billing’, null, ‘left’)
->joinAttribute(’billing_country_id’, ‘customer_address/country_id’, ‘default_billing’, null, ‘left’);

$this->setCollection($collection);

return parent::_prepareCollection();
}

Then near line 103 add a the code below in bold:

$this->addColumn(’Telephone’, array(
‘header’    => Mage::helper(’customer’)->__(’Telephone’),
‘width’     => ‘100′,
‘index’     => ‘billing_telephone’
));
$this->addColumn(’billing_address’, array(
‘header’    => Mage::helper(’customer’)->__(’Address’),
‘width’     => ‘150′,
‘index’     => ‘billing_street’
));

Now you should see Address field displayed in the grid and when export is clicked it would export the field accordingly.

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:

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

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.

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/