The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

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 is the original CSS file.  And changes can be grouped logically for manipulation of like changes, or whatever makes sense to you. (more…)

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…)

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…)

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:

• Structure of Magento’s database.
• Importing data.
• Exporting data
• Extracting data directly from the database
• Building extensions that help with integrations.

Please feel free to comment and ask for me to add to this list.