The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

I found this YouTube video from November 2009.

If you are or have used Magento, do you think it is living up to the promise?

Why or Why not? (more…)

In my last post I explained how to setup a table of flat rates for shipping.  Magento calls this table rates, but whatever you call it you will have to create a table of values to use to calculate shipping.  In this post I will talk about how to create that table using country codes so that you can assign shipping rates for international shipping.  You will need to do this because you don’t really want to charge the same shipping for the country where you live, and somewhere much farther away. (more…)

In another post I talked about using Canonical Links on Magento to preserve the link juice in pages that are found both on their url key and on one or more category paths.  But some people have wondered why they would need to do this.  Well here is that explanation from Google.

Gotta love those guys at Google. This video goes for 20 minutes.  The short version is that if you have a page that can be found at more than one url, (www.example.com/howto/ and www.example.com/tutorial/howto/), search engines that crawl your site won’t know that these should really be the same page.  You will also get people that will backlink to both.

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I recently had to setup a tiered shipping table for a client on Magento.  I did find some instructions, but there were a few missing steps.  So here is a more comprehensive set of step by step instructions.

This is something that you will need to do if you are spreading and averaging the cost of multiple drop shipping vendors, and shielding your customers from getting unique shipping costs for each product.  You want to make sure that you aren’t gouging your customers, as they will notice and go elsewhere.  And it isn’t nice.  But you also want to make sure that you are not eating into your margins too much.

If you are starting a new store, you will probably be needing to evaluate and adjust your shipping table every week as you get data on the average cost and charge.

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Here is a walk through of installing the “Telescope Magento” theme on a 1.3.3.0 Magento basic install.

First download the theme.  (you can find it at the link above.)

When you open this file there is a quick PDF explaining some basics on how to install the theme.  There are also two folders, one is app/ and the other is skin/  both of these could be copied into the root folder where Magento is living.  (yep, there is an app/ and skin/ folders there already.  But you should be able to just copy right over them.) (more…)

For the past few weeks I have been working in an integration project with the Magento shopping system. As I am doing this I am learning some new things about how it works in the inside. I hope that these insights will be helpful to others that are trying to figure this out and make Magento integrations easier for others.

As always there are a few areas that I plan on covering. Here is my short list: (more…)

If you are just starting to use Magento, or you have a Magento that is integrating with another processing system, then it is likely that you don’t want to use the default order numbering increment. If you just need to change the starting number to avoid colliding with existing orders or to make the Magento order numbers resemble an order numbering system that is compatable or similar to what you used before Magento.

In any case you have decided to change the increment ID for your orders.  The fast and easy way is to just change the value in the database.  There are basically two steps.

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A strange thing happened to me the other day.  A friend of mine showed me an email he had received from a job applicant.

Okay, that in and of itself is not that strange.  It was really the content of the email.  It went something like this; (more…)

If you are making a module for Magento, you may need to add an attribute, alter some settings or do a variety of things when the Module is installed. Magento has a facility to do this.

Here is an example of a simple way to add a resource to your Module that will run when it is installed. (more…)

By default Magento makes the name of the product the page title.  And this is way better than having every page have the same title as the main site’s title.  It’s good to have the different aspects of a page, not be identical.  So we have things like description, keywords, title, header tags and other content that does not just repeat the same keywords over and over.

Changing the Title of the product page is one of those opportunities.

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Ever notice what you are looking for something on a search engine, that much of the time you get a nice, short, descriptive text burb.  Some even have a call to action enticing the searcher to visit the site to buy or find out more?  Well, this is not an accident.  And if you are searching and find your own products from your store, and they nave a block of text that looks amazingly like the short description and gets chopped with a … or something at the end.  Well, that is not an accident either.

If you want to change that so that your items are the ones with the cool, FAB statement with the Call To Action at the end, then here is how to do just that.

First, it is important to make your SRP data as effective as possible.  Better than PPC, the search results are what a searcher is looking for, and is more likely to receive a click through.  So making sure your data tells the search engine what to say about the products on your site, allows you to control this message.

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If you are using a tool that asks you to place a tag or script onto your homepage or in every page so that it can track affiliate links or other useful SEO data, you may want to dig into your theme and add it to your header.phtml file.

But on the other hand, you may not.  And sometimes you just need to add a meta tag to show that you own the site to Google or some other entity that tries to make sure it only tracks legitimate data and sites.  And you only need to add it for a verification cycle. (more…)

“Impossible!” You may say.  “All of the good web designers I have known are certifiable.”  Well this may be true, but you don’t have to go crazy just to modify a theme.  The basic plan is that we take all the css changes and we put them in a “child” css that imports the original.

Here is how that works.  The settings in the child over ride the original css.  Thus settings in the child CSS override the same element setting in the original CSS file.  And changes can be grouped logically for manipulation of like changes, or whatever makes sense to you. (more…)

One of the things that can be an SEO concern for Magento deployments is the proliferation of URLs that don’t have unique content.  If you haven’t realized this, the product URL, and the Category/Product URL are the same content, but the URL is different.  Which one should the search engine index?  Both?  If it does, you lose some of the “Link Juice” and your page rank can suffer.

Google addressed this concern not specifically for Magento sites in a June 17th, 2011 posting.  In this article Google explains how they support canonical relational links in the header.  Now you just need to add these to the header of your Magento pages so that Google and other search engines can realize that the category item and the product item are the same page.   And here is a quick way to do just that.

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Ever have a customer contact you because they forgot to place their order with their registered profile?  Well I have.  Alot.

And Magento doesn’t have an “out of the box” way to modify the order to customer profile relationship even though the solution is really simple.

Simple that is, if you are comfortable writing queries in the database.

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Sometimes a customer will input a typo when entering their email address in Magento.  If they do this they won’t get their email notifying them of the order.  (if you have this setup.) And other things may not happen as expected and or desired.

Out of the box, the Magento admin does not have the ability to change this.  But if you are comfortable in the database, then these steps will let you make this change in seconds.

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Creating URLs that contain keywords help your site to be indexed by search engines.  A Keyword in a URL, combined with other factors helps a page be seen as relevant to that keyword in the search engine index.

Magento give us a handy way to control the URL for categories, pages, and items.  Sure, Magento will figure out a URL key to use if you don’t supply one.  But we should take a moment to think about what we are saying to the search engine about the page, category or item that we are creating.

Here’s how it works: (more…)

If you are installing a Magento as a web store for yourself or for someone else, you will want to track how many visitors you have and how many of them convert into customers. Magento makes this really easy if you are using Google Analytic. Here is how it works.

First you will need to have a Google Analytics account.  If you don’t have one, you might want to check it out.  Its free and you can sign up at http://www.google.com/analytics

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During the course of setting up, developing on or making significant changes to a Magento installation, it is necessary to refresh Magento’s cache.  This is pretty straight forward operation, but sometimes simple things can be overlooked.  Here is a quick step by step guide to doing this.

There are two parts to this task.  First is the Administration Cache Refresh.  Second is the Cache File Removal. (more…)