View product in frontend from Magento admin

• Category: Magento Tutorials

When you are editing some product in Magento admin and want to check it out in frontend of your Magento project, how do you find this particular product? Do you search for it, navigate to it using product url key or just browse to it? Well, however you do it, I’m going to give you the easiest way to get to your desired product in the frontend – view product link.

Here’s an extremely lightweight Magento extension which will provide you with a simple view product link next to a product name, in Magento admin. It will point to a product view page in the frontend of your Magento project. Simple and easy.

https://github.com/ivicatadic/Tadic_AVP or for donwloadTadic_AVP

All you have to do is copy the content of Tadic_AVP extension (app folder) to a root folder of your Magento project – and that’s it. I hope this simple extension will prove to be useful to you. Thanks to Branko Ajzele for an idea.

Cheers

Selective attribute sorting

• Category: Magento Tutorials

When you have a large scale Magento store with thousands of products in every top-level category, dozens or even hundreds of offered filters for a single attribute in your layered navigation, certain necessities become mandatory – like selective attribute sorting. Even though Magento does offer sorting functionality for attribute values, in these situations that just might not be enough as you can not sort selectively for a specific category.

For instance, let’s say a customer is in a “First Category” and there he sees a brands attribute in layered navigation, filterable by these values:

A & A Specialties (1) Abella (2) Abex Friction Products (1) Absco Ltd (1) AC-Delco (166) Accel (1) Acco Ind (1) …

Then customer goes to a “Second Category” and again there is this brands attribute with exactly the same options offered to filter by.

Now, why wouldn’t you offer your customers filterable options in the order you find the most suitable, maybe boost sales by emphasizing a certain brand, or just sorted to be a bit more relevant to current category?

Here’s how you can do it with the least coding required. First download the Inchoo_SAS extension and copy it’s content to your Magento’s root folder. This extension will handle all the back-end logic for you.

https://github.com/ivicatadic/Inchoo_SAS or for downloadInchoo_SAS

(Remember to log out and then log back into admin after extension is installed.)

Now, for the fun part. Let’s go to Magento admin -> CMS -> Static Blocks

In order to manipulate the attribute values for a particular category follow these steps: 1. Create a static block: Static block name example: First Category – Layer Brands Static block identifier example: first_category_layer_brands

2. Place the attribute values in the Content area separated by new line [enter]: example: BMW Audi

Note: It must be plain text and no html tags, so hide the WYSIWYG Content Editor.

3. In admin go to the relevant category – in our example it’s First Category a) click on the “Custom Design” tab b) Enter the following custom layout update:

first_category_layer_brands

Place this code outside / after any node.

Note: The name=”layer_brands” serves as an example, you’ll use layer_actual_attribute_code instead, like layer_manufacturer. The only thing that always stays the same is the layer_ prefix.

Inside  you’ll enter the identifier of the relevant static block (see No. 1)

4. Click on “Save Category” 5. Go to Cache management and hit the “Flush Magento Cash” in order to see the changes.

And that’s it Whenever you need to alter the order of attribute values for a certain category, just go to the relevant static block and reorder values the way you like it. Another big gain you get with this extension is that if you sort products by Position in this particular category, you’ll notice that Magento will sort products the way attribute values are sorted as well.

Finally, if you don’t like the required prefix layer, you may change it if you go to Magento admin -> System -> Configuration -> Inchoo Extensions -> Layer Navigation – sorting

I hope this will prove to be helpful to you.

Cheers

Listing products by attribute

• Category: Magento Tutorials

This is step by step tutorial for the beginners that will show you how to list products by attribute. I will start with functions that Magento already has built-in: New products and Promotional products. All the instructions below is made from Magento Professional 1.9.0.0

Listing products with attribute New

You can find settings for defining New attribute in Magento administration under Manage products in Products management. For this tutorial I will use CMS page called Homepage as example. In CMS Page layout -> Layout Update XML is defined template for CMS page by

First of all define product to New by setting definitions “Set Product as New from Date ” and “Set Product as New to Date ”. Magento already has custom listing new product template which you can find in app/design/frontend/pro/YourTheme/template/catalog/product/new.phtml Define where do you want to show new.phtml template by block structure in layouts xml files. Insert the new block

8 4

Define where do you want to show the block with template new.phtml by inserting < ?php echo $this->getChildHtml('newproducts') ?>

In our case this is custom Homepage template located in template/page/html/home.phtml

This is all you need to do.

Note: Content is a core/text_list type and it can hold almost every block type.

You can set how many products you want to show:

8

And how many columns:

44

Listing products with attribute Promotion

Listing products with attribute Promotion is also already built-in function. This is slightly different from listing new products.

First of all we need to create attribute for product in Magento administration Create dropdown (Yes/No) type attribute and call it “Promotion” If you want to show attribute for all product in Magento Administration associate it with default Attribute set Duplicate template/catalog/product/list.phtml file, put it in the same directory as list.phtml and rename it to promotion.phtml Define block location in layout XML file. In our case this is the CMS page “Homepage” 

Define where you want to show the block with template promotion.phtml by inserting < ?php echo $this->getChildHtml('promotion') ?>

In our case this is custom Homepage template located in template/page/html/home.phtml

Listing products with custom template and dropdown Yes/No attribute

In this case we will use Magento’s function for Promotion product and slightly modify it.

Create new directories in app/code/local/Mage/Catalog/Block/Product/List/Example.php Copy content of app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Block/Product/List/Promotion.php and paste it to Example.php In Example.php change:

class Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_List_Promotion extends Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_List

to:

class Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_List_Example extends Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_List

Also change:

$collection->addAttributeToFilter('promotion', 1)

to:

$collection->addAttributeToFilter('example', 1)

After that follow the same steps like I wrote for Promotion attribute. I hope you’ll find this  tutorial helpful.

How to translate product names in Magento through .csv files

• Category: Magento Tutorials

Let’s add to cart one item from our Magento community edition. If you have MCE with sample data you can visit something like this: http://loc.magento.com/sony-vaio-vgn-txn27n-b-11-1-notebook-pc.html?___store=german&___from_store=default Add item to your cart and you’ll see success message “Sony VAIO VGN-TXN27N/B 11.1? Notebook PC was added to your shopping cart.”. Now if we add in our .csv file for de_DE translations something like this:

"%s was added to your shopping cart.","%s wurde zum Warenkorb hinzugefügt." "Sony VAIO VGN-TXN27N/B 11.1" Notebook PC","Sony Deutsch VAIO VGN-TXN27N/B"

If you have already setup all required things for “German” translations, then try again buy same product and you will not be able to see our translated “success message”. It’s not only because of “"” in product name. Let’s find and change (not recommended) in app/code/core/Mage/Checkout/controllers/CartController.php “public function addAction()”, lines

$message = $this->__('%s was added to your shopping cart.', Mage::helper('core')->htmlEscape($product->getName())); $this->_getSession()->addSuccess($message);

to

$message = $this->__('%s was added to your shopping cart.', Mage::helper('core')->__(Mage::helper('core')->htmlEscape($product->getName()))); $this->_getSession()->addSuccess($message);

And now if you buy same item you will get your translations for products for success message. Of course, Magento has it’s own way how you can translate products through admin area (Catalog/Manage products/Edit and you can change from drop-down menu “Choose Store View:” to something and change name of product), but I like have everything on one place. If you are new to Magento let’s do step by step instructions for setting up translations for products through .csv file

1) create a file in app/code/local/Inchoo/Translations/etc/config.xml with the following content:

1.0.0

InchooTranslations.csv

2) tell system about module. You can do that by creating a file in app/etc/modules/Inchoo_Translations.xml with the following content:

true local

3) Let’s create our translations for German in .csv file. Create file in app/locale/de_DE/InchooTranslations.csv with the following content:

"%s was added to your shopping cart.","%s wurde zum Warenkorb hinzugefügt" "Sony VAIO VGN-TXN27N/B 11.1" Notebook PC","Sony Deutsch VAIO VGN-TXN27N/B"

4-a) Let’s rewrite addAction() method. Copy file from app/code/core/Mage/Checkout/controllers/CartController.php to app/code/local/Inchoo/Checkout/controllers/CartController.php and delete everything accept addAction() method. Add this lines on the top of your CartController.php file:

__(‘%s was added to your shopping cart.’, Mage::helper(‘core’)->__(Mage::helper(‘core’)->htmlEscape($product->getName()))); will basically do next: a) look for product name for chosen store view (if exist, else take default product name) b) result from previous try to translate from .csv file c) Interpolate translation of “was added to your shopping cart” from .csv file with b)

Google Rich Snippets in Magento

• Category: Magento Tutorials

Probably most of the store owners would like to have their products to be highlighted among other search results in search engines. Google’s Rich snippets can help you to get desired results. All you need is to integrate them in your Magento store.

About rich snippets and structured data you can read more here.

Sample of Breadcrumbs integration into magento is pretty simple, code of “template/page/breadcrumbs.phtml”