Tag Archives: ecommerce

Displaying custom product collection at Magento frontend

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Product collectionDisplaying list of products somewhere at store fronted is very common task when developing for Magento. Whether it's featured products, sale items or the new arrivals, most developers take the custom block - custom .phtml approach. To be honest, there's nothing wrong with that if you have a good reason to roll your own solution, but 99% of the time, Magento way should be the only way. With that being said, idea behind this article is demonstrating Magento way of displaying custom product collection at store frontend by using Magento built-in blocks and templates combined with a little bit of layout magic.

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Create a custom layered navigation filter for filtering sale products in Magento

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NavigationRetail store project I'm currently involved with heavily relies on Magento catalog price rules to offer pre-cart discounts on selected articles. Even though Magento CatalogRule module does most heavy lifting when it comes to placing products on sale, code allowing logical organization and filtering for sale products at store frontend is left to the solution provider's imagination. In this article I'll cover the filtering part of this scenario, specifically how to make it possible for customer to filter sale and not on sale products while browsing category view pages. There are couple of ways to tackle this problem, with creating custom layered navigation filter being probably the most logical approach.

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Catalog price rules not being applied after product save in Magento CE 1.8.0.0

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Magento LogoMagento project I'm currently in charge for has had the catalog price rules not sticking issue for some time now. This issue has been first reported as catalog price rules being unapplied on their own without any obvious pattern. Since, due to nature of it's catalog, catalog price rules are very backbone of the store in question, situation where prices change on their own was certainly problematic. Even though this Magento project wasn't of this edition or version, it was using Mage_Catalogrule module that was shipped with Magento Community Edition 1.8.0.0. Later research revealed that this issue has been fixed in Magento CE 1.8.1.0 (and all Magento editions and version derived from it), but immediate upgrade wasn't viable alternative at the time because I didn't know what causes this issue and has it been fixed upstream. Allow me to share debug path I had to take to get to the bottom of this.

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Magento extension for logging SOAP V1 and V2 API requests

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Magento SoapLogger ExtensionMagento application programming interface allows third party applications to programatically interact with Magento instance. Magento supports two API standards, SOAP/XML-RPC and REST. Distinctive characteristics of SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is that it uses XML as it's message format, and when used over HTTP it delivers data trough POST request method. My personal preference lies with REST APIs, but in my experience with version 2 of Magento SOAP API, I can freely say that it's one of the most enjoyable SOAP APIs I had privilege of working with. Only thing that bothers me is that Magento currently doesn't provide feature for allowing developers to peek inside SOAP envelope when something isn't working as it should. Essentially it isn't possible to easily debug SOAP API calls Magento receives. In this article I'm bringing Magento extension allowing you to capture SOAP API requests and log them into file.

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