Category: Magento

I have been using Magento for ecommerce development and really like it. I’ll share tips and advice for working with it and improving your Magento Development.

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Improved Custom Magento Order Number Functionality for SetStartOrderNumber extension – v0.3

Well, I said if I got 100 downloads of my latest Magento extension to set custom starting order numbers I’d make some improvements to it, and sure enough it happened. So here are the improvements. Please note I did not actually do the one improvement I promised I’d do, but I did a bunch of others that I hope make up for my laziness. You can get the updated version on Magento connect or download it directly.

In version 0.3 you can now:

  1. Hopefully avoid the Update before Save fiasco
  2. Disable the padding on the order number, invoice number etc
  3. Disable the prefix so that your numbers are treated in their entirety by the increment logic (and possibly the padding logic)
  4. Set a custom increment amount to trick your nosey competitors into thinking you do 1000 orders a day!

If you happen to be reading this JT, I skipped v0.2, but I’ll circle back around for the cron increment functionality you suggested at 300 downloads, promise!

As always please give this extension a try in a dev environment first, it’s still being actively developed and I consider it beta. Despite that I am using it myself on several production stores.

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Magento and Google Analytics – Use ‘First Touch’ Tracking To See How Your Customers First Visit Your Store

At the recent Auckland Magento Meetup I had the privilege of seeing Mark Hammersley’s presentation on email marketing – Mark’s a fascinating guy and a real expert, I highly recommend checking out his site. One of the things that came up during his presentation was the idea of first touch tracking your visits, particularly in the sense that if they first come to you because of an email, and you build a relationship with them and they eventually buy from you – knowing if it was an email and which one brought them to the store in the first place is very valuable information.

Magento does not track this out of the box and neither does Google Analytics, however with a simple customization it can be added to the store. This blog post will run through how I added it to two of our new World Wide Access stores, <plug> Cariboo Cribs – which sells cribs and cots to the UK and soon to the USA – and Dominion New Zealand – which sells high quality sheepskin coats and boots (think New Zealand made Ugg).</plug>

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Latest version of SMTP Pro Finally Uploaded to Magento Connect

Geez it’s been a long time coming thanks to Invalid package.xml format errors and duplicate maintainers and goodness-knows-what else. You can finally get the latest version of SMTP Pro – 1.3.4 – even though it’s identical to 1.3. (thank Magento Connect…).

For those who want to install the Magento extension manually (and if you are engineering Magento you probably should) – you can get version 1.3.4 of SMTP Pro here.

If you read my last post on the improvements, you’ll know that it has some great new features for sending, and logging email in Magento using either SMTP or Gmail/Google Apps. So please give it a try and let me know what you think.

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Easily Set a Custom Order Number in Magento With My Free SetStartOrderNumber Extension

Every time I launch a new Magento store I have to go and hack the database to change the order, shipment, invoice and credit memo numbers. This just doesn’t seem right, and seeing as I was about to launch two stores (in one week!) I thought it’d be better to make the order increment ID’s custom from within the Magento admin panel. Now what I didn’t realize before I set about doing this was that someone had already made a very good extension to customize order numbers – woops.

So not knowing I could just buy an extension for $60, I went ahead and coded one up on my train ride home Friday afternoon.

This is a blog post about what the extension does (and does not) do and how it’s made. I’m going to release it for free, if you need full order customizing functionality, you should still buy Adjustware’s one, it has some great features.

If you’re just here for the free software, you can get it on Magento Connect, if you’d like to learn more about it and how it’s made, please read on.
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Why are my Magento products not showing up?!

This is a just a quickie – got caught out with a weird issue yesterday where the Magento products in a particular category just disappeared – they still existed if you navigated directly to their URL, but they would not show in their categories (though the Manage Categories screen in the Magento admin still showed those products in their correct category).

These things always happen at inopportune times, I was right about to start a pre-go-live review of a site, and was left with one category completely devoid of products, thanks for making me look like an egg, Magento!
Continue reading Why are my Magento products not showing up?!