In my last article I tried to outline Magento way of displaying custom product collection using custom controller action at store frontend. I also made a promise to write a follow-up on the topic covering adding layered navigation to custom controller action with goal of making your product collection easier to navigate. For purposes of writing this article, I'll shift my focus back to Magento extension for managing catalog price rules based sale items, code I originally wrote to demonstrate adding custom layered navigation filter in Magento in one of my previous articles. As a part of this extension, I also created custom controller action used to display only sale items and added the layered navigation to that controller action, something I'll do my best to explain here.
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Displaying custom product collection at Magento frontend
Displaying 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.
Continue readingCreate a custom layered navigation filter for filtering sale products in Magento
Retail 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.
Continue readingCatalog price rules not being applied after product save in Magento CE 1.8.0.0
Magento 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.
Continue readingHow to make specific WordPress posts visible only when accessed directly
Recently I had to to publish an article in a way that common site visitors aren't aware of it's existence. Basically this article had to be excluded from all WordPress loops and visible only when accessed directly. General idea of solution presented in this article is to use pre_get_posts hook to alter WP_Query. Goal is excluding hidden post on frontend, area that isn't single post and when area is single post other than hidden post it self. Now allow me to share code snippet that can be used for this purpose.
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